As I’ve mentioned on here a few times before, I have a group of friends that I met through a FB group that I watch movies and tv shows with over TeleParty. And from that group, a smaller group of us have become close and have a text group between us. We share a lot of random things in that text group, but we share serious things too. And because we are pretty much always talking over text on a daily basis, we have gotten very close. It’s still crazy how close we have gotten even though none of us have met in person yet, but I think a lot of people have experienced that over the past two years.
We’ve done Secret Santas within the FB group we are in before, but this year we decided to do one just within our group. We used a website to set it all up so it figured out who we would give gifts to and it allowed us to put wish lists on there too. I had a bit of a hard time figuring out what to put on my wish list, but I took my time and thought about some things I would normally buy for myself and some things that I might not get for myself. I don’t normally put practical things on a wish list, but it made sense this time.
Because of delays with the post office, we set this all up in November with the idea that we would have a few weeks to get things shipped to each other. And to open gifts, we set up a Zoom hangout.
We’ve been on Zoom together as a group, but only a handful of times over the past 2 years. And it had been a while since we had been on Zoom together, so it was nice to see each other’s faces and hear everyone’s voices. Texting is good for handling a lot of communication, but hearing and seeing people makes it feel more real.
We ended up being on Zoom together for about 3 hours. Most of that time was us being silly and sharing random stories or updates from our lives. There are 3 of us getting ready to move, so that was a part of the chat. But I think all of us craved this social time since most of us are still pretty isolated. All of us are aware of how the pandemic is having a surge so we are all being careful with how much we go out and do things. So having our time on Zoom was a much-needed break from being alone.
And of course, we had to open our gifts together! For the person I got to give gifts to, I sent them 3 things on their list and 1 random thing that I thought would be funny. And I think most of us had that idea because most of us got some things we put on our lists and one or two little things that we didn’t have on our list.
For me, I got 2 things from my list and 1 extra. I got new workout gloves (which I need and hadn’t had a chance to buy myself) and a ring that I saw online that I liked that is a pretty basic ring. And the person who got me my gifts also painted me a little cute square canvas that I know I will put somewhere in my office space when I move to the condo.
I don’t think any of us expected to be on our Zoom for so long, but I’m so glad we got to have this time together. We’ve been trying to plan a group trip somewhere for almost a year, but we keep having to put it off because of the pandemic. We do still hope that we can have a group trip soon so we can finally meet in real life, but we just have to wait until it’s a bit safer. But at least we got to give each other gifts and spend some virtual time together that wasn’t just texting.
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