By Faith Ellestad

‘Twas the season of festivity at work. Our normally quite ordinary, no-nonsense medical department had suddenly transformed into a wonderland of red, green, and silver.  Trees sprang up. Office doors sported wreaths and bells. A menorah appeared on a library bookshelf.  The iconic lounge skeleton rocked a jaunty Santa hat and sparkly red and gold bow tie. 

‘Twas also the season of eating at work.  Around mid-December, the Christmas spirit began to emerge among the faculty. Doctors and clinicians would arrive in the lounge with giant boxes of chocolates, petit-fours, and kringles for the secretaries (and anyone who happened by) to share. In return, we support personnel kept bowls of hard candy and mini-bars at our desks for medical staff consumption.  Weight was gained.  Spirits were bright.  Celebrations were expected.

Who would be in charge of these holiday extravaganzas?  The secretaries, of course.  It was an unwritten but widely realized element of our jobs. Fortunately for those of us less gifted at organizing festive events, there was an enthusiastic subset of support staff who were positively gifted in the social graces and loved nothing more than arranging galas. Their finely-honed festivity radar left no occasion uncelebrated. Each month, our secretaries’ meeting devolved into some type of conviviality, always along with the request to chip in a few dollars for a gift.

We celebrated birthdays, threw baby showers, acknowledged welcomes and farewells.  Once, we even had a shower for someone’s new puppy, complete with dog toys and “Puppy Chow” Chex mix.  The plus side of all this gaiety was wasting work time, but for me, the minuses added up.  My job was scheduling which obviously involved time management.  These “meetings” left me scrambling to catch up. Furthermore, the group’s self-appointed planning committee (apparently those who had endless free evenings to enjoy the culinary arts) had agreed on everyone’s behalf, to a rotating treat schedule for the secretaries’ meetings. As with the frequent requests for donations, I found this irritating.  A mediocre and incurious baker, with two school-aged kids and a husband who worked evenings, I had little time or inclination to toss together some delicious fruit-forward pie or crisp. Ergo, I would invariably show up bearing a beat-up 13 x 9-inch Teflon-degraded aluminum pan of Betty Crocker extra fudgy brownies and a dog-chewed spatula for serving. So lame. To my co-workers’ credit, however, there were never any leftovers, and no one judged.  We were tuning up for that most wonderful time of the year.

By the time December arrived, the party planners’ excitement had reached a fever pitch. The holidays were upon us and it was anyone’s guess what we might be volunteered to do.

One memorable year, the ladies, overwhelmed by enthusiasm, offered to organize a department-wide Holiday pot-luck.  Doctors, nurses, and probably some employees from other departments, were delighted with this idea. Food was King in our department.

“Hang up a sign-up sheet,” they said.

“I’ll bring something.  Sounds like fun” they said.

Soon, an extensive sheet suggesting categories of entrees, desserts, and sides appeared at the reception desk, easily available to all, and shortly after, most of the support staff had signed up, along with a couple of nurses.

“Wow, that’s coming right up,” one of the doctors told me.

“I might be on call that day.  I’ll throw in some money for food, though.”

The cash idea caught fire immediately.

Within a couple of days, the women whose brilliant idea this was, had amassed a few offers of dips and chips, numerous sign-ups for Christmas cookies, and a couple hundred dollars. With no entrees or sides in evidence, but an increasing influx of money, we decided, at a hastily called secretary meeting, to have Chinese food catered with the donations. No mess, no fuss.  That was the end of the ill-conceived pot-luck idea and we never looked back.

Unfortunately, two years earlier, this very group of irrepressible party animals had initiated an unbelievably time-consuming plan involving a Secretary Holiday cookie AND gift exchange for our December meetings.  I thought maybe, after barely escaping disaster with the pot -luck, we would just skip the secretary thing this year.  But no. You don’t mess with tradition. We hashed out the details.

“How much are we supposed to spend on the gift?” I asked Scrooge-ily, feeling the pinch of limited resources.

“Oh, maybe five dollars?” someone suggested.

“You can’t get anything good for five dollars.  Let’s make it ten,” suggested Bev, the woman with whom I shared an office.  Bev was a substantial woman with a booming voice and a very assertive demeanor.

So, ten dollars it was, plus a batch of home-baked cookies. No cheating with store-bought stuff.

I arrived at the meeting on the designated day with my wrapped present and a hastily prepared yet delicious batch of spritz cookies.  Time spent? About eight hours to shop, select the gift, wrap it in last year’s Christmas paper and slightly crumpled red stick-on bow, (you can’t remember everything), buy ingredients, and prepare not one but two batches of cookies because once the kids caught a whiff of  almond spritz, I couldn’t not make a batch for them.

As the year progressed, our support meetings had become pretty desultory. We generally didn’t really have that much to discuss, and mostly complained about our workloads, but the December meeting had a more upbeat vibe. Most of our bosses had been pretty generous with the Christmas gifts, so there wasn’t much to whine about, and the cookies did look festive on their holiday plates.  The variety was impressive. John, our only guy Program Assistant, and his wife had made Babka, much fancier than my spritz or Linda’s thumb-prints, but everyone’s efforts were equally well-received. We traded cookies and munched companionably.

It was time to exchange the gifts.  John and I had gotten each other’s names in the draw, so we swapped.  He opened my Gimbel’s ornament, and I opened his Macy’s ornament.  And so it went.  Almost everyone had come up with the same idea.  Ornaments or Christmas knick-knacks had been the popular choices. 

Laura: “Ooh, pretty!”

“I love it” from Dianne

Janie: “That’s gonna look great on my tree.”

“Oh good.  A calendar!” Someone was thinking outside the box on that one.

I got a “cool” from John.

Etcetera.

“Oh thank God, we’re almost done,” I rejoiced silently, aware my assignment schedule was already late and getting later.

Just Bev and Kristin were left.

Kristin opened Bev’s first. An ornament.  Who would have thought?  “Thank you. Here’s mine.”

Bev reached for Kristin’s package and ripped off the wrapping.

“What the hell is this?” she yelled, outraged, holding up a cardboard circle covered with magic-markered elbow macaroni and stick-on stars. “I thought we were supposed to buy something!”

Kristin started to cry. “My kids made it. They worked really hard.”

Bev wasn’t heartless. “Oh, I didn’t know you had little kids.  How old are they?” she asked Kristin, clearly picturing the pre-schoolers laboring over their masterpiece.

 “Oh yes.  Maggie and Mollie.  Kristin sniffled tearfully. They’re eight and ten.”

Bev snorted, picked up her plate of cookies, set the ornament on the conference table, and stalked out, glaring at Kristin over her shoulder. Laura rushed over to comfort the distraught Kristin and I headed back to my office to commiserate with Bev who was still seething.

Eventually, somehow, détente was achieved between the combatants but our now bi-monthly meetings had become brief and pointedly business-oriented. The party was over.

© 2025 Faith Ellestad

Faith has been writing to amuse her family since she was old enough to print letters to her grandparents. Now retired, she has the opportunity to share some personal stories, and in the process, discover more about herself. Faith and her husband live in Madison, Wisconsin. They are the parents of two great sons and a loving daughter-in-law.