As I wrote about last year, for the past nine years my friends and I have rented out the upstairs room at Max’s Taphouse for our annual holiday party. Kudos to our friends Kevin and Tracie, who usually organize the event for organizing it again this year despite the fact that there was a good chance they wouldn’t make it due to the impending birth of their first child. Their baby was born a few days ago, so they indeed didn’t make it in person. Though because we are the nerdy dorks that we all are they did Skype into the party for a little bit via my husband’s Nexus 7 tablet.

My husband and I should win some kind of prize since we brought the two most popular gifts for the white elephant gift exchange. Per the rules we play by after a gift has been stolen 3 times it is frozen and no one else can steal it. Our gifts were the only two that got stolen enough times to get frozen. I brought an Atari Flashback, which is some reissued Atari thing that came preloaded with 40 Atari games and looks like an old Atari, but of course is some new thing sold to nostalgiac old people like my husband who play it twice and then let it rot in a corner. I predicted that would be the hot present at the party. I wasn’t expecting the broken laser pointer cat toy that my husband bought to be so popular. It was some cat toy, possibly bought from Think Geek I think that is a laser pointer that you turn on and it randomly moves around for the cat to chase without you having to do any work. The motor in it is dead though, so it doesn’t move around anymore. I suspect most people did not realize that fact when they were vying for possession of it.

We managed to come home with yet another stack of crappy B movie DVDs. I swear every year one of us manages to pick the present composed of bad DVDs. I’m not entirely sure where they all are at this point, but I think we’ve amassed quite the collection. I got the complete collection of some little plastic toys called S.L.U.G. zombies. Ok actually looking that up I only got the complete collection of one of the series. I was just going off the packaging, but apparently there are way more of these things than I thought. Perhaps something people can look forward to seeing again at next year’s party.

It was as usual an enjoyable way to get together with friends and celebrate the holidays before we all go our separate ways. I imagine we’re going to need to start rethinking where we hold this party given the rapidly increasing number of children in our group of friends. Though people have been bringing their babies/toddlers to the party for the past few years it’s getting sort of unrealistic to think that a room in a bar is an appropriate place for us to have a party with that many kids.