#like genuinely Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a yankee swap and seeing the Bear !!!!!!

[canisonicscrewyou]

Good news everyone: I didn't go home with my family's annual Yankee Swap Bear Curse.

Hilarious news everyone: There is now, after about 44 years, a second identical Bear in play, and somehow my dear oldest sister went home with BOTH of them.

You see, my maternal family's perhaps most prized family heirloom is a broken, plastic bear on a bicycle that at some point in its life was meant to be a novelty toilet paper roll holder. You put the roll on, you grab some TP, he does a little bicycle while you pull, teehee. One year it was gifted in our Yankee Swap, a Christmas tradition much older than the Bear, sometime in the late '70s to early '80s. My Great Aunt Peg hated it so much she regifted it the next year. Someone else went home with it. Two years later, the Bear is hidden inside of another gift, and goes home with someone unnoticed. We forget who. There used to be a list of years+names, just like we used to still have the box it came in, and it used to have a part to hold your roll of TP. Now it's just a Bear on a bicycle.

It gets passed around yearly in a game of vicious deception by hiding it in some way. Usually inside of another gift. And, since it IS a Yankee Swap, the recipient of the curse can bestow it upon someone else. Horrifically so. Fights have started at the table over being swapped the Bear.

Because nobody wants the Bear in their house. And nobody wants the responsibility of keeping track of the Bear for an entire calendar year, remembering sometime around November 1st, if they're lucky, that THEY went home with the Bear. And now they have to figure out where they have stored him begrudgingly since last Christmas, and also what the FUCK they're going to do with this stupid Bear to put one over on the rest of their family and make sure it doesn't end up in THEIR house over the next year, too.

And you know what?

That's the Christmas spirit, baby.