Secret Santa Stockings 🎁

A better way to do Secret Santa

Secret Santa can be really fun, but the traditional method of doing it has a few problems. It can be anxiety inducing trying to think of what to gift someone, but also when receiving a gift from someone you hope you don't have to fake your gratitude for a lame gift.

Drawing names out of a hat can also cause problems. It's hassle and it can often go wrong for mathematical reasons.

The Secret Santa Stockings method was developed to solve these problems!

The Problem with drawing names from a hat

The Numberphile youtube channel explains the problem with the statistics and also touches on the lame gifts.

Pulling names out of a hat can often lead to situations where people can figure out (eg. through process of elimination) who others have been assigned, so the secret santa is no longer secret. Or you reach a dead end where someone can only pull their own name out of the hat, and so you have to start the whole process again.

There are Secret Santa Generators online that can solve the problem, but they don't solve the other problems, ie. The often poorly thought out gifts that people receive.

The Problem with Traditional Secret Santa Gifts

You may have noticed the problems with the usual gifts that people give:

  1. 🗑️ Secret Santa gifts are often useless tat/novelty gifts that go straight in the bin, often contributing to unnecessary plastic waste.
  2. 😬 People end up being assigned someone they don't know very well. They either try to swap for someone else so it's not a Secret Santa any more, OR...
  3. 🤨 Someone receives a lame gift loosley based on one of their interests, eg. a book on numbers because you're a maths teacher.

So how can we solve these issues and make Secret Santa fun?

A Better Secret Santa

In our group of 16 or so friends, we decided on some new rules that would let our Secret Santa experience more closely resemble a stocking full of goodies:

  1. 🎁 You gift 5 different people, and will receive 5 gifts from different people. Everyone makes (or buys) 5 gifts using a budget of £25 (£5 per gift). The idea is that you make 5 of the same thing.
  2. 🙈 It's double-blind anonymous. You don't know who you will be gifting right up until it's time to exchange gifts.
  3. 🎨 Gifts can be bought, but preferably hand made for a personal touch. You can spend your £25 budget on supplies. No useless tat allowed. Nothing that will end up in landfill immediately after the gift exchange.

This solves the problems in a few ways. First, we've banned useless crap 🚯. Second, it remains secret as you don't find out who you're gifting until it's time to exchange, so no struggling to think what a particular individual might like. And fourth, your gift being hand made gives it a personal artistic touch that will be appreciated.

Receiving 5 gifts also means that even if one person half asses it and gifts you a crappy gift, you're still being gifted by 4 other people, so if you have creative friends, you should get some nice stuff. If you don't have creative friends then, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that. Get better friends.

You also don't have to spend a lot of money. You can add value to a gift by putting effort into something creative, which should hopefully give your gift a more personal and meaningful flair.

Another added bonus of this method is if someone drops out, it doesn't ruin it for everyone; the other participants can still do the gift exchange. If you don't think of anything in time (lame), or can't make it to the gift exchange, everyone else can still exchange their 5 gifts.

Ok, I'm ready, how do I do this with my friends?

Some Gift Ideas

Here are some gift ideas that have been exchanged between my friends in the past:

Hopefully you're good at art, cooking, sewing, electronics, engineering, woodwork, gardening, or have some other creative skill.