White Elephant

This year my office decided to do a company wide white elephant gift exchange with a twist. Instead of opening presents then trading, we reversed the order, so you had to trade based on the wrapping. This leads to some unique wrapping techniques, but hands down, I won the award for most unique wrapping job.

We started our search for the perfect present at Goodwill where we found this:

No doubt this would be an excellent white elephant gift. But we continued our Goodwill search and found this:

For those unfamiliar with their zoology, it's a mythical Liophant, a close relative to the Liger, but exceedingly more rare. And this particular Liophant also happened to be a puppet. It begs the question- how does such a beast come into existence? The mental image of a lion and elephant...you know... "procreating", that's almost as disturbing as this stuffed version of said creature.

My initial thought was to have the Liophant riding the giant red whale, but I came up with the brilliant idea to use the whale as the wrapping for the Liophant. After cutting open the whale, I found that it was filled with styrofoam balls and cotton, so I had to make a little pouch and sew it into the whale:

Then I put the Liophant inside:

And Lianne helped add some ties to keep the gaping wound closed:

It was a huge hit at the office. Each gift could only be traded twice. The first person picked the whale, the second stole the whale, the third didn't want it and picked a lame gift, the fourth stole the whale for the second time, and thus the dynamic duo found a new home. Congratulations to Michael, the owner of the white elephant worst, but most creatively wrapped, gift.

On a side note, the company I'm at is pretty fantastic. This year they gave each of us gift card with the caveat that we have to spend half of it helping someone else in need. So now we have $125 that we get to spend making someone else's holiday brighter. I'm pretty excited about it. Now we just need to find someone in need. Now accepting applications.