Sunday Newscape Magazine

For a long time, the holidays just weren’t complete for me until I’d laid eyes on The Chia Guys. See, every year at Christmas time, we get together with a group of friends - a motley mix of miscreants if there ever was one - for a rather raucous version of the white elephant gift exchange. That’s the classic game where people draw numbers and then, in order, either select a wrapped gift or “steal” a gift someone else has already opened.

The game is also called Dirty Santa, and in our case, that’s probably a more accurate description. Things have often gotten down and dirty in the past as some of the participants - not surprisingly, all of them men - employed tawdry tactics designed to win a decade-old pair of pottery heads which have never had a chance to grow green hair. The ultimate prize, for some weird reason, has been to go home with The Chia Guys.

It wasn’t always this way.  When someone first brought one of the strange creatures to our gift exchange years ago, the Chia Guy - one of those terra cotta planters that, when spread with seeds, grows into a little bush - was the object of universal scorn. No one wanted the butt-ugly bald dude with the big, loopy grin. Naturally, I was the one who got stuck with him.

He spent a year on a shelf in our garage, and at the next gift exchange, I cleverly re-gifted him, along with a newly purchased Chia Guy. When my unsuspecting victim opened up the box containing this dynamic duo, everyone howled with laughter and began chanting the Chia theme song (“Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia!”).

The pottery pair spent several more years in difference garages, never coming out of the packaging but always making an appearance for the holidays. And gradually, possibly due to excessive consumption of eggnog, the Chias changed in our men’s minds from chumps to champs. Suddenly, all our fellas wanted them.

That’s when things got hairy. At each gift exchange, once someone had opened the package containing the clay creations, theft was the expected action at every turn. Chia-inspired chicanery, including bribery, collusion, even some good-natured attempts at extortion, became commonplace among the men. Normally staunch marriages were temporarily tested when, for example, a wife used her turn to choose a nice gift and bypassed the terra cotta twins, over the vociferous objections of her husband. Marital spats over the chias could go on for days. We women eventually realized that things were getting out of hand. The ever-grinning, but never germinating pair was corrupting the spirit of our season.

So last year, we took action. We announced that the Chia Guys were being retired and would no longer be part of the annual gift exchange. After an appropriate period of mourning, the men agreed it was all for the best.  The Chias were consigned once again to a permanent place in our garage. I don’t have the heart to throw them away. But they are free to a good home.

© Jackie Papandrew, All Rights Reserved www.jackiepapandrew.com