The highlight of the social calendar in the life of every Liechtenstein Sailor is the Navy White Christmas party, which brings together the entire crew in their best Navy White Uniforms. This year was no different, although the party didn’t go down as well as planned…

Aside from giving Sailors an excuse to put on their finest white uniform and get into the Christmas spirit, Operation White Christmas also has a charitable cause as we were raising funds for Operation Santa Claus, an annual fund raising event organized by the South China Morning Post and RTHK which benefits 16 local charities.

To try and beat last year’s fund raising target, the Admiralty devised several strategies for coaxing money out of its highly paid crew. While one of them accidently went very wrong for reasons we shall not elaborate on here, the others were reasonably successful:

Uniform checklist: Sailors are fined for uniform violation. Result was reasonably successful as several missing caps, gloves and unpolished shoes resulted in costly penalties. Also, missing or non-white underwear – personally inspected by the Admiral – were also costly mistakes.

The Elephant Scale Test was an abysmal failure: Sailors were put on the Navy’s state-of-the-art precision weight measure device in order to compare their current weight to the last measure back in June. Every kilo up from June would cost $10 to charity. To the surprise and dismay of the Admiralty, almost all Sailors (aside from a few exceptions – guess who) had actually lost weight in the offseason.

The Navy Quiz was a bit more successful as many Sailors failed to answer the most simple and basic questions about Liechtenstein or the Navy (such as how many kilojoules of energy does one can of Foster’s provide?). Special discredit should go to Sailor Marcus who couldn’t even answer how many countries Liechtenstein shares a border with – and he hails from neighboring Switzerland!

But it was the Silent Auction that raked in the most money, as some exquisite and exclusive items were up for grabs, including limited edition out-of-production post racing shirts from previous seasons (such as the highly coveted 2005 Cervelat shirt). The bidding was particularly fierce for a pair of silver Navy cufflinks which attracted the two highest bids of the night. Interestingly, nobody bid for a beautiful replica of the Liechtenstein castle in a snow globe, possibly due to the fact that the castle was half submerged, possibly due to global warming.