John & Toni’s NJ 2011 Christmas Package

Hey everybody.

I wasn’t sure the best way to do this so it would be available to all of you at about the same time. (I wasn’t even going to try setting up a conference call.) This is the best thing I could come up with.

As you know, for several years we’ve been sending gifts just to Mom, Connie, Cindy, and Mike. (And everyone in the 30-years-old-and-under crowd shouts, Yeah, UJ, we’d NOTICED that!) This year, a possibility came our way which lit a light bulb over my head. It was too good to pass up. One catch — I’d have to announce it before Christmas, for reasons which will be clear in a moment.

Here’s the deal:

1. We’re giving you all a long-distance family holiday lobster-fest: 12 live Maine lobsters (each weighing about 1¼ pounds), 12 pounds of mussels, and 12 jumbo crabcakes.
2. The above would be delivered all at the same time, to ONE location. (The shipping is overnight.)
3. Delivery date of your collective choice. (The only restrictions are that the place we’re doing this through can’t arrange delivery on a Sunday or Monday… or on Christmas Day.)
4. If y’all do a head count, you’ll realize that not everyone will get his/her own lobster, pound of mussels, and crabcake. Presumably, once it’s cooked, all this would just be dumped on serving plates and then everybody would lunge for whatever they could grab all at the same time. Sort of like a game of SPOONS, only with fat, flexible, and slippery “spoons” instead of the regular kind.
5.  If you want to, of course there’s nothing preventing you from buying or otherwise providing and preparing more lobsters (etc.), or “regular” food for people with shellfish problems and so on. Feel free to invite more people if you want, too. (Hell, invite FEWER if you want.) Guest list of your choosing (except, duh, Toni and I). Whatever you want.

We just want to hear about how it all went after the fact.

To take advantage of the deal, we needed to “order” it by a date a couple months ago. (We didn’t have to specify a delivery date then; we just needed to pay for the whole thing.) But we didn’t want to make specific decisions for y’all. We had to choose ONE person to be the nominal recipient of this gift, and that one person would go to a particular Web address and claim it by the due date.

Three guesses who that one person was.

Right.

So anyhow, Connie has already “claimed” the gift. But — and this is important — she did NOT necessarily agree to host this bash. Depending on what y’all decide, she MAY host it. Again, it’s up to all of you.

Now, about the timing: as you already know, Sunday and Monday delivery are out. The meal has to be ordered and delivered by April. As I told Connie, the obvious time is sometime over the holidays, when people are in NJ from elsewhere. But — are you detecting a pattern here? — yes, it’s up to you.

(If it helps to figure this out… We’re hosting our own fest here a week from today, with a couple of friends. We contacted the order department to find out the best day to actually place the order for delivery next Saturday; they told us that if we knew the date, we should go ahead and order as soon as possible. So we ordered a couple days ago.)

That’s about it from this end.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to use the form below, or of course you can always just email me. :)

HAVE FUN!