I’ve been involved in some Secret Santa gift exchanges before and made out pretty well, I think. An orange-shaped lump of chocolate one time, an Amazon gift certificate another. Solid workplace gifts.
The Redskins defensive backs their Secret Santa on a slightly different level. (“Nah, nah,” LaRon Landry said. “No secrets, just a gift exchange. We drew names.” Whatever.)
Reed Doughty was sitting in front of his locker today, already changed after practice into his usual everyday-guy jeans-T-shirt-sweatshirt-sneakers combo, a Gucci bag sitting incongruously next to him. “Should’ve put your name into the defensive back secret santa pool,” he explained. “Fred Smoot had me, so I got my first pair of Gucci shoes.”
I asked if Gucci shoes weren’t a little steep for the usual twenty-bucks-max Secret Santa. “Yeah, I can be a little frugal at times, so when I found out that Fred was giving me these, I was, like, whoa.” But Doughty found out in time to adjust his gift for Doug Dutch.
“My man Reed got me a BluRay disc player, two discs,” Dutch said. “I got LaRon something, but he wants me to wait until Christmas. He’s a traditionalist. I asked if he wanted his gift, and he said” — in a stunned voice — “‘Nah, nah, nah, tomorrow, man.'”
Smoot was walking out of the locker room carrying — you guessed it — a Gucci shoebox. “Carlos [Rogers] got it for me,” Smoot said. “I knew it’d be something like this. That’s his style.”
But not Doughty’s style?
“Well,” Smoot explained, “you know, we was gettin’ people gifts and I wanted to get Reed something that was out of his character, but smooth. So, you know, Reed’s not a flashy guy, but I made him a little flashier.”
And, according to Smoot, it’s working already. “I think it is. Reed’s a good-lookin’ guy.”
Justin Tryon had wound up in a gift loop with Lendy Holmes, so the two settled on some sort of roughly even exchange, but he hadn’t missed what the gift of the season was. “All Gucci bags, for everybody,” Tryon said. “Them DBs, man, they give great gifts.”
Smoot agreed, although he put it slightly differently. “It’s just DBs,” he said. “DBs, we take care of each other.”
(Landry might not have received his gift yet, but with all the talk of Gucci, he did give me a quick informal update on the monkey of the same name: he’s awesome, he’s grown bigger, he can jump, he’s demanding, and he’ll be at Redskins Park for a visit before the end of the season. I’ll keep you posted.)
