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Your so-called friends decide a Secret Santa before
everyone goes home for the Holidays would be just delightful, wouldn’t it? Yes,
it is delightful when your parents pay for everything and always make sure your bank account is never in the red,
because it would be such a shame if Daddy’s Little Girl or Mr. Momma’s Boy
would have to lift a finger and earn some dough while getting baked at school
(see what I did there? Yes I did!)
So what do you
do? There’s barely money left on your meal plan let alone your bank account
after a semester of being swindled by the afterhour’s cravings for beer and
Popeye’s. So you need to get a great gift, but you can’t afford to waste
another dime. There is nothing wrong with “borrowing” a sheet of construction
paper, a pair of scissors, and maybe a crayon to make a holiday snowflake that
reads “Merry Xmas, Bitch!” Too vulgar for your style? No problem. Remember that
84 cent pack of index cards your parents bought you? There is nothing better
than whipping out one, and just writing “I.O.U one free back rub.” Anything cheap and underhandedly flirtatious
works very well. However, in such frugal scenarios, you will still be so cheap
you make hobos look like Ebenezer Scrooge.
If you could
only spare five bucks, there are many great gift ideas to get unless the person
you have to buy a gift for is a vegan (unnatural swine!). Then screw them, because
they are not real anyway. With Abe Lincoln in your wallet you could grab 5
items of the Mickey D’s dollar menu. A nice can of beer would do it for
presumably anyone. Hell, if you could wank out ten bucks, you could grab a
whole six-pack of beer. Or if your friend is more than just a beer drinker,
-and by “more” I mean an alcoholic- you can buy them 3 Four Lokos for
Christmas. If your Secret Santa is much more classy perhaps a coffee table book
or even a Starbucks gift card for ten or fifteen dollars. That shouldn’t be too
bad for the common college cheapskate. Imagine a friend just after Christmas
enjoying a Peppermint Mocha in a Starbucks lounge while perusing their new
book, Hot Guys & Baby Animals*.
Enough of that
“bah humbug” stance. The whole Secret Santa thing won’t bring everyone down. Your
spoiled rich friend has everything planned to buy a great gift; ready to spend
an exuberant amount of money to make everyone else look really bad. After all,
plenty of rich folk here at HU, and JAPs** can still celebrate Christmas. After
all, their dad produced every Christmas special ever made. Imagine what they
could buy. If they spend only $100, they could hire the janitor to dress up as
a Nutcracker and sing a Christmas Telegram. Nothing says Happy Holidays more
than abusing the needs of the lower-middle class anyway. Am I right or am I
right?
Clearly if the
rich friend wants to get in on the action of this holiday tradition invented by
the poor, they should do so with a $1,000 gift. However, caviar and a
200-year-old bottle of Merlot is just so generic and overdone in college anyway. Rich people do know that poor people need
money though. That is why no one will be surprised when somebody receives a $40
messenger bag filled with 960 one dollar bills inside.
It is so easy
to forget to buy a gift and end up scrambling to make the improvisational
“I.O.U.”. Why? Daydreaming. What if for one day you could be incredibly
wealthy, and be able to afford a $1,000,000 Spresent? You could WOW your friend
by adhering to The Barenaked Ladies and buy your friend a house (and then move
in with them, because after all it was very expensive). How about a pair of matching
Ferraris? One for yourself, and the other for your friend. It will be like
Turtle Doves, except it’s a Ferrari; and Ferraris are bad -wait for it”¦ass. If
you do not like the person, a $1,000,000 gift card to the campus California Pizza
Kitchen works. Then it hits you though. If you had that much money to spend on
a secret gift, what more perfect would a trip around the world be with the
world’s greatest tour guide, Charlie Sheen. Then and only then will you be
“WINNING!” for the holidays.
*Hot Guys & Baby Animals= Yes, it is a real
book and it makes me feel funny downstairs when I skim the pages.
**JAP=Jewish-American Princess (It’s not racist, but a
term of endearment such as WASP***.)
***WASP=White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
