Holiday Parties Out the Yang

A poorly lit photo of me and
a co-worker at our holiday
party. 

It's that time of year, isn't it? The time when you have a zillion holiday parties at various times for various people and with which you carry various levels of enthusiasm for?

I had three holiday parties last week and one the week before. Three of the four were work-related, because I'm still working on my LA friends. The one that was just the office and no clients was at a nice restaurant in Pasadena and included a Dirty Santa or White Elephant or whatever else you want to call a random gift exchange with present swaps and stealing. (What other names are there?) I ended up with a belly full of red wine, chocolate souffle, hangar steak and french fries, and a purse full of a new Sephora eye shadow palette (SCORE!).

The next night I grabbed some reindeer antlers with bells, and toilet paper (the perfect hostess gift in my opinion) and headed to some friends' housewarming/ holiday extravaganza. Because I'm kind of getting anti-social with new people in my old age and I wasn't drinking, I stayed for about 4 hours and then headed home. The party when on for another 5 hours. So technically I left halfway through. But I still had fun. And learned how to phonetically get my team to guess the name of the prime minister of Britain during World War I  (Clement Atlee). It was my shining moment in party games.

So, now I'm a little holiday partied out for a few days. However, I did make Christmas cookies out the yang (yes, there's a lot of things coming out of my yang in this post) yesterday, as well as homemade wheat bread. And a lasagna the night before. And my Christmas shopping is done and shipped. So I think I'm in a good place.

How many Holiday Parties have you been to this year? What were the White Elephant or Dirty Santa gifts that you ended up leaving with?

On a lighter note. . .

I now work in an office that dresses up for Halloween. I've never been one to dress up much. Mostly because when you're overweight there aren't enough "sexy" or cute costumes so you end up being something like a nun, with lots of fabric.

But this year I panicked last night when I realized that just about everyone else was dressing up except me. So, I headed down two blocks on Hollywood Blvd (where it's Halloween 365 days a year) and got a few items to make my costume. In case you don't recognize it, I'm Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, one of my favorite characters of all time.

At the end of the day, I realized that I would love to wear a tiara every day.

Our whole work crew. My boss as Prince has to take the cake. She really committed.