Nov 20, 2012

Is Your Office Ready For Secret Santa?

Yellow House Events just did our Secret Santa draw this morning, in preparation of our office holiday party this year. We love spending a bright, December morning together drinking mimosas, eating brunch and swapping presents. Is your office participating in this age-old tradition? If it’s your first time organizing your office’s Secret Santa party, read on- there are a few things to keep in mind!

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.