Sorry guys, I must vent. Rant incoming.
Okay, so my dad's side of the family has a big Christmas party every year. We normally hold it on Christmas Eve. In about October we have a drawing. You reach into a hat, draw a name, and that is the person you buy a gift for. The limit is usually about $25. This is the way we have done it for DECADES.
Well, one of my aunts is being all difficult this year.
She wants us to try something different because "we always do it like this." Well duh, it is because it WORKS. Everyone gets a person to buy for and everyone gets a gift that they want. This year she wants to do a "white elephant" type thing, where everyone just brings a roughly $25 gift and we all just shuffle the gifts around and randomly distribute them.
Yeah...no. Everyone keeps trying to tell her that this simply WILL NOT WORK because we have too many people with too many different ages. We have five adult men, four adult women, four men in their early 20s (That includes myself) a girl in her early 20s, a thirteen year old boy, a twelve year old boy, a ten year old girl, a ten year old boy, a seven year old girl, a three year old girl, and an infant that is almost one. Add in the very, VERY wide variety of interests and you can see why this would be a total nightmare. Everyone keeps trying to tell my aunt that it just wouldn't work, we would run into too many situations where a guy got something like perfume or a 3 year old girl got something like, say, an R rated action movie, or a grown man getting a Barbie doll.
But no, my aunt is CONVINCED that this retarded way of changing the drawing would be so much better. She keeps saying "well, if someone does run into that situation then they could just bring it back and exchange it after Christmas." Or, you know, we can keep doing things like we have for ****ing DECADES and not have to worry about fighting the post-Christmas exchange and gift card shopping war.
Ugh...of course this is screwing up all the rest of us. Most of us aren't procrastinators and like to get our shopping done well before Christmas. For example, my mom is usually done by the middle of November. Of course this aunt has never been the brightest bulb on the chandelier. I remember once when I was in high school I put on her list some Magic boosters from the newest set. We told her to shop at the local hobby shop, which is less than three minutes from the mall and gave her clear directions on how to get there. The following conversation happened at the party:
"I never want to shop for Magic cards again, they are too hard to find."
-A few of my other aunts and mom look at her strange because they have never had any trouble finding Magic cards for presents.-
"Really? -local hobby shop- always has plenty of Magic cards."
"Oh, I didn't shop there. I tried the mall, but none of the stores there sell Magic cards. I then checked out several Gamestops, K-Mart, Target, three Wal-Marts, and Toys R Us. I finally found them about a week later at a Wal-Mart!"