At 6:30PM on December 10 Greg and Cathy Hockel are hosting the Christmas Party this year. The address is 103 Longfellow Dr., Millersville, MD, 21108. Their phone number is 443-618-0563.

The club via our host will provide drinks, cups, plates, napkins, and utensils. It’s potluck so please bring a dish to share. Bring your own beer and wine.

As usual, we will have a White Elephant gift exchange with the party. Please bring a wrapped gift for the exchange under $25.00. The gift exchange is completely voluntary.

Everyone who brings a gift draws a number. The person who draws #1 then picks a gift, opens it, and shows it to the rest of the company. Then, in ascending numerical order, the participants choose to either pick and unwrap a new gift from the gift pile or “steal” a previously unwrapped gift. If a gift is “stolen”, the person who had their gift taken from them gets to pick from the gift pile or “steal” a gift from someone else. The turn then passes to the next number (if a gift was chosen from the pile) or to the person who was just robbed (if a gift was stolen). Gifts can only be stolen two times (the third owner is the final owner), and a gift cannot be immediately re-stolen. When all the
gifts have been opened; the game is over.

Camera club folklore tells of a gift so bad that it has been re-gifted at our Christmas party for ~30 years. It disappears and is lost for years at a time, then suddenly reappears. That gift is the Pretty Neat Cosmetic Organizer.

What are the odds it will reappear this year? Did someone receive it last year? Will it reappear this year? Will you be the lucky recipient? It’s kind of like when people tell you it is good luck when a bird craps on you!