In offices and homes around the country, friends, family, and co-workers participate in Secret Santa gift exchanges at Christmastime. It’s a fun way to celebrate the holidays with some gift-giving fun, without the expense of buying multiple gifts. However, in this electronic age, many people have friends who they only know online, through internet chat rooms and discussion boards. You can run a Secret Santa gift exchange with your online friends too, and here’s how!
Getting Started
One person should be the organizer and run the whole exchange. If you find you can’t handle everything get a helper, but it’s best if only one person does the communicating so that there’s no confusion or lost messages. This person should be able to get online at least once a day to field questions or problems (that’s where an assistant might be able to help).
Post a thread on your forum to see if anyone’s interested. Usually plenty will be, but you want to make sure you have participation before you do a bunch of work. There will be people who have never done this before and will have lots of questions.
Once you know that you’ll have enough participants, post a questionnaire for everyone to fill out and send to you. It should include all of their contact information (email, snail mail, phone numbers), likes and dislikes, and a brief profile. Here’s one that I’ve used:
Screen name (required):
Email address (required):
Snail mail with name (required):
Phone number (required, two would be nice):
Hobbies/interests:
Favorite colors/decorator colors:
Your favorite treat:
Chocolate preference (nuts? Milk? Dark?):
Treat no-nos:
A brief bio:
Your clothing sizes:
Jewelry you like/want:
Anything else you can think of/really want:
Your age (or at least a range):
Rules
You’re going to have to have some rules. The biggest problem with online secret santas is that it’s really easy for someone to disappear and not deliver their gift. I use the following rules in my exchanges and I haven’t had any disappointed participants yet!
1. Pick a deadline to have participants send you their info. I usually make it November 15th. I suggest that people mail their gifts around the first week of December to give them plenty of time to arrive before Christmas.
2. Set a price range for the exchange, which everyone needs to agree to. $20-$30 is a good range.
3. If for any reason a santa can’t follow through and buy a gift, they need to contact you so you can make other arrangements for their recipient. When I ran my last couple of exchanges, I had a couple of people offer to buy two gifts in case someone’s santa didn’t come through. Luckily I was able to keep in contact with all of the participants so I didn’t have to take them up on their offer.
4. This is up to you, but I recommend that santas reveal themselves to their giftees inside their gifts to preserve the surprise (and fun) as long as possible. All communication can go through you until the giftee opens their gift. Some people prefer to never reveal who the santa is.
5. When recipients receive their gift, they need to thank their santa. The most fun way to do this is by posting on your forum for everyone to see, listing what they got.
6. Contact information will be kept discreet–no sharing it with anyone but the assigned santa, no posting on the internet, no selling to Viagra salesmen, etc.
Staying Organized
As your participants start sending you emails, you’re going to have to do something to stay organized. Either print all the emails and use a file, or transfer the basic information (name, screen name, email, exchange partners) to an Excel spreadsheet. This is my favorite method, because I can see all of the information I need at a glance. I also keep it from year to year to make sure that I don’t give anyone the same partner.
Figure out a way to randomly assign partners. It’s best not to assign two people to each other (i.e., person A is santa for person B, person B is santa for person A), because it could get too easy for people to guess their santas-and you’d have a problem if you had an odd number. I always get people who want to sign up after the deadline. If that happens, I give them the person I assigned to myself, and I’ll be their santa.
Keep track of the gifts-note on your spreadsheet when each person receives their gift and when their gift is received. As it gets close to Christmas, start posting reminders on the forum. You may have to start sending emails to people who are late sending their gift, or call them if they don’t respond. If they disappear, follow your contingency plan to make sure their recipient gets a gift.
Secret Santa gift exchanges are a great way for online friends to get to know each other and enjoy the Christmas holidays, although there’s no reason why you couldn’t do the same type of thing for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, or any other holiday! It always gives everyone something to talk about for a couple of months, and some people will become fast friends through the experience. Give it a try this year!
