Team Christmas Dinners

I love my current team because they love to celebrate Christmas just like me. That’s not usual in this non-Christian country.

We had two Christmas dinners, but before that, we did a belated birthday surprise for our VP Evelyn on December 15, on her first day back from vacation. We asked Ivan and Gabriel (guys from another team) to serenade her with a guitar, then after she blew out the candles on her cake, we all had pizza afterwards.

That night, we had our team Christmas dinner with our directors and general manager, who were in town for a business trip. We went to The Royal Mail, a British restaurant.

My British teammate Carly chose the place because they had yorkshire pudding, a dish she missed from back home. It was my first time to try it, and it’s yummy, specially when paired with steak. The steak was so good, soft and tender, but surprisingly heavy and I really hard time finishing it.

I had the Eton Mess for dessert because I’ve never tried it before and our British director said that it was good. He was right!  😋

The next week, on December 21, our Singapore-based team had another Christmas dinner with our former teammates Vivek, Nick, and Yan Ming.

This time we went for a buffet at Carlton Hotel’s Cafe Mosaic. They had a 1-for-1 promotion for UOB and Citibank card holders, so we paid only 40+ per head.

I thought the highlight for me would be the honey baked ham and stuffed turkey, but it turned out to be the really fresh seafood. I don’t usually like oysters, but they were really delicious here! I loved the prawns and tuna ceviche too. 😋

But while the food was really delicious, the real highlight of the night was our movie-themed exchange gift which we had been excited about for ages.

The rules were complicated. Very. But that was the fun part about it.

We all had to buy a $15-20 gift that was related to a movie, but the connection should NOT be obvious.

For example, if you receive a gift from the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, what would you expect it to be? Chocolate, right? That’s the obvious choice. The not obvious one is Charlie. 😆

Other examples we thought of:

• Titanic – Frozen doll (or a sketch of you wearing only the heart of the ocean)
• Inception – pillow
• Forrest Gump – I said I wanted to go to the Daiso $2 store and pick several items all related to the movie, like a feather, running socks, chocolates, shrimp, toy gun

On the day of the event, we gave the name of the movie our gift was from to Guohao, who listed everything on a piece of paper. Some of us decided to name multiple movies for our gifts.

The movies were:

1. Phantom of the Opera / Titanic
2. Shark Tale
3. James Bond / Star Wars / Avengers
4. The Fast and the Furious
5. Alice in Wonderland
6. The Lego Movie
7. Green Lantern / Kung Fu Panda / V for Vendetta
8. The Producers
9. Star Wars
10. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Then GH made us draw numbers. When your number is called, you can choose what gift you want by picking from the list. It was fun trying to guess what the gifts could possibly be.

We were able to guess numbers 7, 8, and 10 correctly.

We all berated Nic for getting the obvious stuffed shark for Shark’s Tale. “You should have labelled it Finding Nemo, or 50 First Dates, or something.”

Meanwhile, one of the interns had bought a last minute gift and labelled it “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” We all thought it would be chocolate, obviously, but it turned out to be Charlie, just as we had said in our example. 😂

The gift I picked was something I guessed – animal masks, which are all the rage in Asia right now.

This was my gift:

I related it to 3 movies because:

1. James Bond – Goldfinger
2. Star Wars – Both Anakin and Luke got metal hands
3. Avengers – This is really Iron Man’s hand

This was really the most interesting Christmas exchange gift theme I’ve ever experienced! Fun times!