A tale of Miss-Tree

In the last three years, every Christmas, I seem to have had a different kinda headgear.

2003 - Headgear of snowflakes

UK. My first snow. My first snowball. My first snowball fight. The very experience of looking up at the sky, and watching the tiny snowflakes slowly descending on my little black dress. Masi screaming at me and my cousins, "Get inside!" and we screaming back, "Get outside!" Finally, we dragged everyone out and had the most awesome snowball fight. Almost got knocked out by a snowball Sid threw at me! :|

This is me holding my first ever snowball!







2004 - Santa cap

I convinced all editors in the Science and Maths teams to wear red to work on Christmas eve. We even bought Santa caps for everyone. Everyone was very enthu about the caps all morning.

My Managing Editor looked at us and remarked with amusement, "Whatever happened to my editors today? I only see Santarinas around!"

The santarinas were all over the office, spreading cheer. However, by lunchtime, most caps came off, but I, the stubborn one, refused to take mine off.

One of my designers P came to me and said, "Now this is my kinda Santa!"

The evening was also all about Santa caps. I was at my friend's bachelor party, and in the true Christmas spirit, we were all wearing Santa caps, this time the one with flashing lights.

Then somehow all the caps got mixed up, and later I decided not to take mine home. For the very simple reason that Lady K had been wearing it. Not that there's any problem with Lady K wearing my Christmas cap. Except for one slight issue. Just like the other Lady K in the movie Titanic who said "wearing only this", my cap was also the only thing this Lady K was wearing.

I learnt the valuable lesson that being the only girl apart from the stripper at a bachelor's party is not such a good idea after all. The things she did with the cap left me with no desire to take it back home.

I even came up with a corny spoof song for Lady K a la George Michael:

Last Christmas I gave you my cap
But the very next minute, you were sittin' on it
This year, to save me from fears
(Have not thought of a fitting last line yet!)

This year, one of the attendees of that bachelor's party sent an email to the rest of us. The subject of the email was 'I know what you did...' and the body of the email said 'last christmas'. After laughing uncontrollably for about a minute or so, I did a reply all saying, 'Shouldn't I, as the only girl, be sending this email to the rest of you??" That email sure brought back not-so-pleasant memories.

So this year, I had no plans for any Christmas headgear. But it looks like fate had other plans for me.

2005 - Hawa-hawaai headgear

My company had a Christmas party this afternoon. At the entrance, we were asked to pick a hat each from a rather horrendous looking collection of plastic hats. Should I take the pink n blue one, or the multicoloured one? Realising that all of them were equally ugly, I picked one up that was a screaming fluorescent yellow with a black band. If you're gonna do it, do it in style, I say.

They say that the choices you make lead you to your destiny. It was true for me. The hat I chose led me to my rather interesting destiny.

The organisers asked us to form groups of ten based on the hat colours, to play some game. We were asked to number our group members. Then there was an announcement, "Number seven of each group, you are..."

"The group leader! Yippee!" I mentally completed the sentence.

(Errr... Yes, I was number seven. And I can get very competitive in these kinda games.)

"The Christmas tree!" said the person making the announcement.

"Yippp... hey wait a minute, did she say Christmas tree?????" I stopped in my tracks.

"Yes, she did!" said my delighted groupmates. "And now we're gonna make a delightful Christmas tree of you."

Before I could say "What the..??!!" there was another shocker. We were given a box that apparently contained materials for decoration.

On opening it, we found a roll of toilet paper and a roll of scotch-tape.

Thanks a lot man. Whoever thought of it.

But at least we were given the option of using any other material we wished. The best Christmas tree would win the prize.

My team soon got busy.

Over my fluorescent yellow hat, I had an assortment of fake fruits, apples, peaches, grapes, the works. I believe I strongly resembled Miss Hawa Hawaii from the movie Mr. India!

My costume was a three-layer white dress made of strips of toilet paper. There was a mini Christmas tree stuck to the top of my hat, possibly to give me a triangular shape. My earrings consisted of humongous golden Christmas tree balls. Puppets in the shape of characters from my books were stuck all over the white dress. There were empty boxes, more puppets and more fake fruits around my feet to act as Christmas presents.

I looked at the other groups and their 'Christmas trees'. Most of them looked quite tortured and traumatised. But I was having a ball! It's not every day that you have three guys and seven girls dressing you up. I felt like a pampered bride from a royal family in medieval times. Only difference is that the royal family in medieval times probably did not wear wedding dresses made of toilet paper.

Suddenly we heard an announcement that the tree should have a theme and an explanation of the objects used to decorate it. That's when we panicked, because obviously, we were just having fun, and there really was no theme to what we were doing.

Finally, after many many corny jokes ("Save the trees, recycle toilet paper!" being just one of them), we decided on 'Environment-consciousness Christmas tree'. As the spokesperson of my team described every bit of my 'costume', I stood there and animatedly pointed at each decor item as it was being described. I kinda felt like an uninterested air hostess aboard an Air India flight, telling uninterested passengers about where the emergency exits were.

For some strange reason, I had a yo-yo with a model of the globe in my hand. My spokesperson pointed out the yo-yo with a concluding line "That shows that the earth is hanging from a string. Save it!" It was a blast. Howls of laughter greeted the sight of me, which I am still not sure was a good sign or a bad one. People started taking pictures with their phone cameras dammit! My own editor Banana was having quite a good laugh looking at her boss looking like a moron, and was clicking away to glory.

The picture reproduced here is from her collection. I can't really post the others 'cos of privacy issues, as people are visible in all of them. So I cropped out my hawa-hawaii hat, and here it is!







We did not win. Of course. This is real life, not Bollywood. The cool guys don't always win in real life.

But they do make sure they have a blast of a time.