White Elephants

If everyone else has family reunions similar to ours one of the notoriously strange episodes that occurs at each one is my brother Dan trying to explain to people why he thinks the earth is hollow (he's an engineer people--apparently they have equations for this kind of thing). But that's not the weird family reunion thing I wanted to write about. That honor goes to the 'white elephant' gift exchange. In the educational portion of our blog we will explore exactly where this term comes from (seriously this entry is bound to be just as boring as it sounds).

In Thailand the legend of the white elephant begins with the origins of the country's main religion--Buddhism. One night the Buddha's mother had a dream in which a white elephant ran into her womb (I'm really not sure exactly how to use the word 'womb' in a sentence, but that was my best shot). The next day she awoke from the dream to discover that she was pregnant, and several months down the line Buddha was born. In honor of this episode Thais began looking at white Elephants as holy. In reverence to them these creatures are not used for labor (unlike the elephants at the elephant farm by our house who are forced to make weird looking paintings with their trunks to sell to tourists--it's like some kind of elephant sweat shop). Farmers and other landowners quickly realized that owning a white elephant was not necessarily a good thing. They still had to feed and take care of them, but the lazy albino behemoths didn't work. Representing this dynamic the term 'white elephant' came to symbolize something that didn't have any particularly useful function. At some point this phrase was adopted into the English language, from where it was borrowed by family reunion planning committees (I imagine that things as serious as family reunions must be planned by committees). So without further ado, here are some pictures of 100% real white elephants:

Not as white as I imagined either before seeing the pictures, but still...


Yep, this guy is as useless as Julio Lugo, or Jason Giambi (that one is for you odeman)


Picture published in Thailand of an elephant voting. He's also wearing a Santa hat, so I think he might have another gig booked after this one at a local mall.


So this one is a normal, non-white elephant. Notice how useful he looks. As a matter of historical record (and as her facial expression indicates) this is Maisy's first view of one of these guys.