Last week the white elephant tradition returned to Hawk Teams! At a white elephant gift exchange, everyone brings a gift and puts it in the middle of the table. The presents don’t need to be expensive, they can be something from your house that you don’t want anymore. After all of the gifts are placed in the center, everyone sits in a circle with the presents in the middle. To figure out who goes first you can either put numbers in a hat or you can do a wheel of names. Once the first person opens a present, the second person can choose to either steal the gift or open a new present from the middle, continuing the pattern until all of the gifts are gone. If in the case that your present got stolen, you then get to choose to steal from another person or pick a new gift from the middle.
A really great gift was Elena Lecomte’s (‘25) framed picture of Dwane the Rock Johnson. Elena says “I knew I needed that picture of soon as I saw it. I love the Rock.” She received the gift by stealing it from a classmate. Another fun gift received by Shep Bower (‘26) was a ziplock bag of water. Cecilia Whitmer (‘24) received a very silly gift of a SpongeBob figurine. What was so great about it was that the Spongebob figure was flexing. Melat Perberg (‘24) says, “I LOVED white elephant so much – it was so funny because someone got a bag of water.” Although some students received some unusual gifts, overall the 2nd annual white elephant gift exchange was a success.