Subject: Christmas/Holiday Gift Giving At Work
To: Workgroup
Cc: Department Boss
Folks,
Every year I have been going around and asking (begging/cajoling) for some amount of money to pool together to buy the boss one big gift card. The decision of what store that card should be from is haggled over until a consensus is reached. I then go get the gift card from said place, stuff it in a Christmas card that we present to the boss at our annual holiday lunch at a local restaurant. At that same meal, the boss usually turns right around and hands out an individual gift card to each and every one of us, for about the same value as our individual donation to his card, in appreciation for our “hard” work during the year.
Well, this year I propose we stop the madness. Let’s avoid the whole senseless swapping ‘X’ amount for the same ‘X’ amount already. A free lunch on the company, a hardy handshake and a “thanks for everything” is all that any of us really want during this holiday season. I think it would be better for each of us to take that gift card money and drop it in the red kettle outside a grocery store or donate it to a charity that you feel is doing good work (or buy yourself Independence Day: Resurgence on BluRay.)
If someone else wants to take up the mantle of gathering money to pass along something up the food chain, please leave me out of it. I’m not a total Grinch, so if anyone, group or individual, wants to give another individual in the department a gift, by all means go for it. And after this, if someone still somehow feels the need to give me a gift, I will thank them profusely and promptly go out and buy a share in a goat in Zanzibar of equal value in their name.
Brian
P.S. Immediate Boss, please, don’t take this personally just because this is your first year as the boss and this is the year I’d like to opt out of the gift card swaperoo thing, it’s been festering for a few years now.