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Christmas Diaries

December 7.

We’ve officially started today the Winter Celebrations in ITSS. 2020 was a challenging year for us all. While spending a solid 10 months in WFH (work from home), it was unarguably challenging to keep and grow our #ITSSCommunity and to adapt to the new online office life.

Thanks to all of the above, we’ve decided to join forces during this last month and create together internally the best online Christmas event for all of us. And to go big! Because we deserve it. This is why we put together a team of 15 ITSSers, called the elfXperts, and came up with this great version of a 2020 Christmas Tale in ITSS. This exclusive event is focused on interaction, on fun, on giving and it is 100% online. We’ve crafted an extended program that took the form of an Advent Calendar, where each day marks a challenge, a workshop, a contest or a happening. We even made our exclusive personalised Christmas Passport, that supports activity badges for engagement, a golden buzz for standing out and 3 special badges for consistency. The most Christmassy attendees can become Xmas Groupies, Xmas Spirits or Xmas Fanbassadors (we’ll explain how we’ve came up with that particular word later) .

Today we had the first Photo Challenge: St. Nikolaus boots. We will leave here the two winning pics for you.

We invite you to be a part of it & follow our Christmas Tale until the 18th of December!

xoxo

The elfXperts

… to be continued

December 8.

A lot of rumour on our Christmas Teams Channels today as well, as the theme for the Photo Challenge was Winter Squad. We had a lot of teams that just paused their regular meetings and took a Christmassy picture; others have met especially for that.

At the end of the day, after counting likes

and hearts

and laughters

, we saw there were two winning pics again. And, well, they are pretty different; probably just stressing how different we actually are in #ITSSCommunity. Hence, we have a Gangsta Team and a Reindeers Team winning this challenge – we post them here for you.

One of the other daily activities on the Christmas Tale’s agenda is ‘Guess the ITSSer’ – meaning some of our colleagues have shared with us pictures of themselves as kids, and everybody gets to see how much they have aged have changed. And they have to guess who the kid is. That’s pretty funny! And also pretty secret. 😜

We’ve actually decided to leave you a litter spoiler today, so check out the Advent Calendar we’ve crafted. It shows the entire agenda of our event.

See you soon with more stories!

xoxo

The elfXperts

te be continued…

December 9.

Last night it snowed in Bucharest, and that created the perfect scenery for the 3rd Photo Challenge in our agenda: A Winter View.

Our Christmas Teams Channels were packed with snow pictures, as you probably imagine, but one (and only one this time) was most acclaimed. It stands for finding joy in isolation, and we think it perfectly describes the winter of 2020. See it below.

Oh, and the ‘Guess the ITSSer challenge’ was … well, challenging today. There was a lot of guessing involved and some clues and a lot of jokes and laughter. The pics will remain secret, but still. Just thought you would care to know.

Tomorrow we’ll have the Christmas Cards & Decorations Workshop – pretty thrilled about that. Naturally, we’ll share pics with you, so stay tuned!

Just thought we’d share a little teaser – the workshop’s agenda

Ok, talk to you soon!

xoxo

The elfXperts

…to be continued

December 10.

Don’t you sometimes have that distinct feeling that something big happens just for you? Naturally, afterwards you snap back to reality, and acknowledge to yourself that’s not possible, convinced it’s just a coincidence. But, still… We had that winter view challenge the other day, and it snowed a lot in Bucharest. Now it rains (also a lot!), and there’s no more winter view through our windows. But when the time was right, we all got our great winter pics. 🙂

Today we had a new photo challenge: My Best Christmas Friend. It was heavy stuff, we tell you! It involved pets, and children, and plants and, basically, what ever matters most for us. And this is the winning pair: Bery & Covidel (a heads up here, but don’t tell him

– Bery won the #CatBattle). So, who’s your best Christmas friend?

Moreover, today was both busy & magical, because we have created Christmas cards for our family or colleagues. Since the pandemic started, during the day we are busy with work, but today we found the time for this special activity, that some of us joined with our juniors (something different for them – playing together at 3 PM). The Christmas Cards & Decorations Workshop had simple requests: all we had to bring was creativity, joy, paper, scissors, colours and a lot of sparkle. Sparkle was mandatory! Look here what we’ve created.

The 3D Christmas tree card was a fun project for all ages! Younger kids just love crafting, but it was fun for older kids and grown ups as well!

Hope you liked our activities, and maybe even get inspired!

Keep in touch.

xoxo

The elfXperts

…to be continued

December 11.

Just before the weekend, we had a busy and fulfilling day. It was the Winter Sale, as you can see in our Agenda, and it was filled with satisfaction, because we organised an auction and the money gathered from the bids were redirected to 3 social causes. The Winter giving joy was embraced by about 50 of our colleagues and in an hour we managed to rise about 10200 RON. To this, there will be added some individual contributions as well, that will double the amount as it seems by now. We are more than happy we can help out the people in all three causes and that we’ve unprecedentedly seen the #power of our Community !

As for the 5th Photo Challenge – The Christmas Mug – though we had some pretty powerful candidates, it was won by this yummy and christmasy drink made out of coffee & marshmallows.

As for the Guess the ITSSer challenge…we received so many pics from our colleagues since they were kids that this week we will have 2 rounds of guessing / a day. ✌

We have a full schedule this last week before Christmas, so follow us for more.

See you soon!

xoxo

The elfXperts

…to be continued

December 14.

New week, new challenges: the 6th photo challenge – Oh, Christmas Tree! Oh, Christmas Tree! – it’s exactly about, you guessed it…our Christmas trees. A lot were shown, just one has won. Check it out below.

We also had two Guess the ITSSer challenges today, all went well, as planned.

We’ll keep it short today, because we have a looooot to prepare!

Talk soon!

xoxo

the elfXperts

…to be continued

December 15.

Disclaimer of the day: we are a tiny bit unconventional.

Now, let’s carry on. Our 7th photo challenge was all about Christmas traditions, and we got plenty of them: beautiful family-gatherings around the Christmas table, enchanting Christmas traditions from the marvellous Bucovina or Rîmnicu Sărat or even Bucharest, families and friends visiting the Christmas markets or children waiting impatiently for Santa . But then, we are not a very conventional bunch, as we disclaimed, so the most voted Christmas tradition was:

Yup, the traditional Christmas Sleep. And, c’mon, admit it! We ALL do it! And at least we’ve got ourselves a meme out of that:

So, please, do tell us what’s your favourite Christmas tradition!

That been said, we’ve managed to pull something serious today as well: the Bubble Makers workshop, were some girls and boys from ITSS crafted these colourful and delicious-looking soaps. We discovered we have some talented colleagues amongst us. We were truly impressed, really now. These handmade soaps could make some great and inspiring Christmas gifts, don’t you think?

Workshop 2: Bubble Makers

It was a very good day after all, because we’ve reached this pretty important conclusion about our #ITSSCommunity: we are both unconventional and talented, and that’s something worth telling all of you about.

Get ready for more.

xoxo

the elfXperts

…to be continued

December 16.

Busy elfXperts days begin to pay off, as today our first colleagues started receiving the Christmas

🎁
🎁

presents! Well, let’s just say this: if you are not experiencing the joy of giving, you don’t know what you are missing. It just hit us: must be awesome to be Santa! But we are perfectly fine with being Santa’s little big and unpredictable helpers. So tell us, what’s your most treasured elf-experience till now?

We also had another premiere in our Christmas Tale: today’s photo challenge – Christmas Lights – took us international and this set of pics was most voted:

City lights

The images are from Copenhagen. As you know, we are remotely working for 10 months now and moments like this truly bring us together, wherever we are! Must be that #ChristmasMagic everyone is talking about spreading across our #ITSSCommunity too or something.

To conclude here, we can foresee more and more Christmas

🎁
🎁

presents tomorrow and in the following days (only we and you know that!

), especially that according to our Calendar tomorrow is…. drums and suspense everybody… the one & only: Secret Santa! We are not going to lie here, we are downright ecstatic! Can’t wait for the presents to tell you all about it! Stay tuned for the updates!

Bonus: enjoy this short video of big city lights – shot this evening in Bucharest.

xoxo

The elfXperts

…to be continued

December 17.

We’re a bit late with the update for this day, only because we are busy elfXperts and we have to do stuff.

But we truly had a lovely day, with lots and lots of photos for the daily challenge. The theme was Christmas ornaments, and one lovely colleague sent to us this winning angel – for hope in 2021:

Our Christmas passports are almost ready and we are getting closer & closer to get those Yuxi points!

Christmas Passport

Oh, if you don’t know this by now, Yuxi is our gamification platform, developed internally, and most of us are waiting for the season end, hence yuxi points are VERY important for some of us in high ranks!

Winter Yuxi

Today also happen the awaited Secret Santa, and we had some fun moments seeing the reactions, the presents, some emotional messages; but better check it out for yourselves:

Online Secret Santa

Special thanks are in order here for the courier companies these days – we really appreciate their efforts!

We had a wonderful day, we are thrilled with everyone’s engagement and we thank you all for the beautiful gifts!

Well, tomorrow is the last day of our Winter Tale.

xoxo

#excited & #greatful & a bit #tired elfXperts.

…to be continued

December 18.

Our Christmas Tale has come to an end. Now it’s time for all of us from IT Smart Systems to focus on the Christmas Holidays, surrounded by our dear ones while taking a well-deserved break.

Let us get you through this day, because it was full and fun and somewhat unexpected.

First, the photo challenge was pure genius, and we don’t just say this because two of our fellow elfXperts came up with the task. Two words: Meme this, and it involved the present form the Secret Santa. First of all, this generated some inside jokes – we have to mention this one here, even though you can’t fully appreciate it:

Ryke vs. Finest meme

Long story short, Ryke & Finest are two apps we currently develop and you can find out more about them visiting our more serious ‘business pages’ (like this). Let’s carry on.

The most voted meme iiiiis:

What??? It is funny! …minus the seasonal depression ofc.

Afterwards, we had this really cool workshop that involved cocktails & decorating cookies, that went like this: choose a cocktail recipe – do it – decorate some drunk cookies.

It went well. We are satisfied with the result.

The next happening was: Guess the Carol. It was awesome! Real competition there! Well organised (we used kahoot), relaxing until it actually started and everybody wanted the victory, classic carols, in Romanian and English, kinda’ made us realise we don’t really know the actual NAME of the carols, but hey, we all know the lyrics, the melody and even to sing along.

After this, we were suppose to watch a movie together, but we were so into this kahoot thing that we started playing another one that involved cartoons in the 2000s. It was fun!

We want to leave here a bonus pic, because, well…not everybody’s pics went online, on the blog or on our instagram, but Anca really, really, really (!) insisted and she was a great elfXpert after all. So here goes:

Well, guess this is it! We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Grand 2021! And we appreciate you reading this!

Over & out,

The elfXperts

the end.

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