These are a few of my favorite things

Adult Content if you are one of my children, you may want to skip this one…lol

So, at Christmas time last year (2024) my niece and sister hosted a Favorite Things gift exchange. If you have not been to one before, they are a great excuse to invite all friends over to drink, eat and have so much fun! The basic idea is that you invite a group of your friends, each friend brings a few, usually 2 or 3, of the same unwrapped gifts. These gifts should be some of your favorite things like hair products, cooking gadgets, books, etc. Your host will set a budget for each gift,  then you will play a little game and each friend will go home with the same number of the gifts they came with. Now, this is not a “white elephant” gift exchange, so really put some thought into what you are bringing and bring something you really love. It’s a way to share your enthusiasm for things you love to use on a daily basis. 

My niece invited a wide range of guests, her grandma, cousins, her sister, aunts, nieces, and a few close friends. We were asked to bring 2 gifts in the $30-$50 per gift  price range. The gift selection was awesome, with such a wide range of ages, from 20-something to 80ish, there was something for everyone! We were given instructions to wrap our gifts in clear cellophane so you can see what it was. All the gifts were beautifully displayed on a table (see photo), my sister  made cute little signs with our names so we knew where to put our gifts, it was awesome! I was a couple cocktails in when I started to check out all the gifts, I started making my mental list of the items I was hoping to score, would it be the the Detroit Lions baseball hat, maybe some super fancy olive oil, possibly a couple interesting cookbooks, I love a good fuzzy blanket, and then, there, in the back corner of the table was this interesting looking rectangular hot pink box, so of course I had to check it out and you will never believe what it was, I’ll give you three guesses… yup, you guessed it!!  Decision MADE. Now, I just had to hope that I pulled an early number so that I could get first dibs- I was pretty much assuming that Grandma M didn’t have that on her radar so that was one guest down. Now, we all gather in the living room, the first thing we do is go around the room to tell everyone what we brought and why we love it. This just made the game a little more fun, I couldn’t wait to see who brought that gem of a gift…lol So we start going around the room and to my surprise, it was one of the “twenty-somethings” and not only did this young lady have to get up and tell what she brought and why she loved it, but she had to do it in front of her grandma! Let’s just say her sweet grandma turned about 50 shades of pink while she listened to her youngest granddaughter go on and on describing all the magical features this thing had. It was finally time for the game to start. My sister went around the room with a hat filled with numbers and this would be our picking order- we would go from 1 up and then back down again for the second gift. I couldn’t help but get just a little excited when I picked the number one! Yes, I was the lucky one who got to pick first, I had my choice of everything on that table. I may have jumped up a little too quickly, after all it has been over 3 years! So with as much excitement as a child on Christmas morning I headed right over to that table and just as I was about to scoop that little sucker up (no pun intended, or is there?) it hit me that my daughter was sitting in the room with me…now, do I go the safe route and pick up the blanket, I mean, I could find some comfort in that too, or do I just do it?! 

You could have one too!