A Play-By-Play Of Our Annual Holiday Event

Every year, in keeping with the spirit of the season, our staff of book marketing experts enjoys a surprise holiday event. This year we had a pretty good idea of what we would be doing, but we didn’t want to ruin the surprise until the day of! As Nirvana by J.R. Stewart was our biggest title of the year, it was decided that our holiday event would have somewhat of a dystopian theme.

But first, before we encountered our dystopian-themed event, we had to eat! This year, our director elected to take the team to Terroni, a long-established Italian restaurant within the heart of Toronto’s vibrant Queen West community. We had a great time catching up on non-work related things and absolutely loved the food. The freshly prepared donuts for dessert (filled with custard and Nutella, of course) were amazing!

After we finished our lunch, we had a short walk to get to our mystery, dystopian-themed event. And, of course, we had correctly guessed the event – a mystery escape room! Upon arrival at Lost Canada, we were “briefed” (it was very brief) on our mission. Our room, The Return of Nemesis, was the hardest one they had. Now, to avoid spoiling the mission, we will not get into details about the actual room itself. However, we will say that it was very difficult, and you had to be on your toes to find all of the clues. In the end, we did not escape in the time allotted and the zombies got us. BUT, we came close, learned a lot about each other, and had a lot of fun in the process!

The final part of our holiday event had a charitable aspect. At DigiWriting, we believe it’s important to give back to the community and those who are less fortunate, and each year we double our donations, both to Room to Read and as part of our office event. Along with a donation of books, each team member was given the joy of doing some holiday shopping for a local charity. With only $20 in our pockets, we were asked to go and get as many items as we could for an underprivileged youth. Obviously, we had to be frugal about our purchasing decisions! After some shopping and some calculating, the following day, we arrived at the office with our items. These were donated to Red Door Homeless Shelter.