How to Organize a Secret Santa Event at Work

It's been a slow day at work, and your supervisor has just volunteered you to oversee your office's annual "Secret Santa" event-an anonymous exchange of holiday gifts among coworkers (or at least among those coworkers who choose to participate). How do you get through this process without alienating everyone on the 17th floor?

Instructions

1. Alert your colleagues by email. In a mass mailing, inform your coworkers that you're handling this year's Secret Santa festivities, and urge them to sign up by a specific date (say, ten days before Christmas). Give them the basic rules: complete anonymity, no gifts worth more than $10 or $20, no recriminations for not participating. Then sit back and wait.

2. Once you have a final list of participants (you'll probably have to send reminder emails to get people to commit), write down their names on tiny slips of paper and put them into a hat (or a styrofoam coffee cup, or a basket-it doesn't really matter). Gather the participants around and have them draw names from the hat at random.

3. Now here's the hard part: once everyone has drawn a name out of the hat (or coffee cup, or basket), DON'T let them reveal whose Secret Santa they are. In a small office-say, nine or ten people-you need only a couple of loose lips to completely unravel a Secret Santa and allow everyone to know who's getting what for everybody else. Then the pressure is really on either to impress coworkers or come up with something absurdly creative and unexpected.

4. On the appointed day, gather everyone together and have them put their wrapped gifts in a big pile (each gift should bear only the name of the designee, NOT who it's from). It's best to ask everyone to do this at the same time, minimizing the risk that a particular gift can be traced to a particular person.

5. Allow everyone to open their gifts. At this point, the names of some of the givers will likely be divulged, and the relative worth of the presents will be judged, for better or for worse-but you don't care anymore, because the Secret Santa is over and you can finally get back to work.

Tips & Warnings

• NEVER pester reluctant coworkers to participate in a Secret Santa event. Lack of interest isn't a sign of terminal Grinchhood; the fact is that some folks are more resistant to office-sanctioned holiday events than others (or simply have better things to do).

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish