Secret Santa

Day 357 / 366

There are less than 10 days to go for this rollercoaster of a year to end. And the festive season is making things a bit more cheerful.

It’s Christmas, and like many other offices, my team is celebrating Secret Santa as well. I have worked in 5–6 companies before this, but somehow I never got a chance to participate in Secret Santa. So it’s exciting.

For those who don’t know, Secret Santa is a Christmas game in which people are randomly assigned another person for whom they have to buy a gift. But no one knows who has gotten whom. The gifts would then be collected and people would open theirs and try to guess who they might be from.

The toughest thing I found logistically about this was how we were supposed to collect the presents with the sender being anonymous. Of course, if only we had an HR, then they could have collected the presents from everyone and kept them hidden discretely. But we don’t, and it was hilarious how about a dozen people with engineering degrees were not able to figure out a way to collect the gifts and still keep the identity of the sender hidden.

Here’s what we came up with finally. We would have plain boxes that look exactly the same. Everyone would put their presents inside the boxes before they came to the office, and then we would keep the boxes together and shuffle them. I took the responsibility of coming up with the boxes but soon realised that I was too lazy to do so. So I have substituted the boxes with blinkit paper bags that already have lying around.

This is what I like about festivals. For me, the religious significance of most festivals doesn’t matter that much. What matters is that they give us a reason to celebrate with our friends and family.