Oh Those Crazy Librarians!

   I attended our library staff appreciation Christmas party last Thursday evening.    I had a great time.  

   I work with a lot of very good people.  We are a silly bunch of folks who know how to laugh and have fun.  When I got home that night, my face hurt from laughing so much.


   The costume of the evening was reindeer antlers and red foam noses as you can plainly see.  One of my co-workers brought these in for the whole staff to wear and keep to take home!

I'm clear in the back row, far right in the red sweater in case you can't recognize me with my antlers and nose on. 


   We enjoyed a delicious catered dinner in a festively decorated meeting room at the library.  We all sat down together at a very long table.  (Well, it was several tables end to end, but we were all together.)  Dinner included chicken breasts cooked in and smothered with mushroom sauce, roast beef, lasagna, two kinds of salad, green beans almondine, mashed potatoes and gravy, a large assortment of desserts, and iced tea or lemonade.  


   I took this picture from the end where I was sitting, so you won't find me in this picture.  I'm sure you'll notice that most of us are still wearing our antlers, but the noses have come off.

   A very generous anonymous patron donated $1,000 to pay for this party because the library can no longer fund such events since the budget cuts.  How amazing and wonderful to have someone do that for us!


   The wall was decorated with elf pictures with the faces of staff members glued on.  The director and assistant director captioned each one with something funny for that person to say.

   Part of my job is to design flyers for the main library and for each of our five branches.  Quite often I am given short notice to create something for the events we have scheduled.  So this is the caption that they came up with for my elf.  

   We played some games and were each given two presents from the library.  Everyone got something different, but one of the gifts was some sort of candy and the other was some sort of seasonal item or decoration.


   I received this very pretty red and green snowflake set which included a bowl, a plate, some potholders, and a dish towel as my seasonal item.

This is the candy that I received.  Well, it WAS the candy that I received.  By the time I got around to taking a picture of it, my son had already found it.  (Actually, I gave it to him as soon as I got home.  I was lucky to find any still in the package at all by the time I got around to taking a picture!)

   We also had a staff white elephant gift exchange.  We had great fun with the exchange.  The gifts ran the gamut from quite bizarre and garish to quite nice.  We played a game with the gifts where we could steal something someone else had already unwrapped or open a new gift when it was our turn.  There was a lot of trading back and forth with some of the gifts.  It was pretty funny the way it all turned out.  I ended up with one of the nicer items, although for part of the time I had a really big and ugly statue of a man in a brightly striped coat in my possession!  What was even funnier, this same statue had made the rounds at LAST year's white elephant Christmas gift exchange.  This is the gift that was mine when the game ended.  

   I had a great time at the party.  It is nice to be appreciated for the work that you do.  It's also good to be able to say that the people I work for and with, are not just my coworkers, but are also my friends.


   I know you all wish you could have antlers and a red nose like mine to wear, but I only have one of each, so you will just have to settle for a picture of me wearing them instead.