Finally, the Swedes never seem to have made the breakthrough that is the Secret Santa’s key reform – the bit where you get to discharge all your Christmas obligations by giving things to one person, and one person only.
If you push Google some more, its AI will tell you that “the modern Secret Santa system is widely attributed to philanthropist Larry Dean Stewart”. Stewart, it seems, was a Kansan businessman who “starting in 1979 anonymously gave out $100 bills to people in need during the holiday season”.
This is AI at its daftest. With all due respect to Larry Dean Stewart, I don’t think he invented the concept of giving away money anonymously. More to the point, the Secret Santa system has got nothing to do with helping the indigent. On the contrary: it’s designed to stop the rest of us from joining their ranks, as a result of shelling out way too much money on Christmas gifts. The Secret Santa model is about reciprocity, not altruism.
If we can’t say who invented the system, can we at least pinpoint when it came in? The Oxford English Dictionary, which is usually reliable on such questions, isn’t great on this one. After defining “Secret Santa” in the modern sense, it cites historical uses of the phrase going back to 1933. On inspection, few of these examples match the way the phrase is used now.
The OED’s earliest relevant citation comes from a 2001 novel by Canadian author Marilyn Lightstone. “The past two Christmases,” Lightstone wrote, “they had done Secret Santa, a sensible face-saving device when there are lots of gifts to buy and cash is in short supply.”
Finally we have a bullseye. Lightstone is describing the system we use today. And the fact that she has to explain it to her readers suggests that it was still, in 2001, a relatively new thing.
That sounds about right to me. I recall a Christmas from the early noughties when my family used the system for the first time. We drew the names of our giftees from a hat. If we drew our own name, we would put it back and redraw. We soon realised this was happening with suspicious frequency. Evidently, some of us were returning names to the hat because they were the names of people we didn’t want to give presents to.
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This of course isn’t on. For the system to work, the name you draw must be sacrosanct. If you don’t like it, you have to take one for the team. Once, at a crazily large Christmas gathering, I had to be the Secret Santa of my brother’s wife’s mother’s cousin’s husband. I didn’t know him from Adam, although his name did coincidentally happen to be Adam. I can’t recall what I gave him, but it wasn’t one of my finer efforts.
This year I’m doing Christmas with a much tighter crew. We drew our names online, by spinning a virtual chocolate wheel containing everyone’s name except our own. Watching the wheel revolve, I realised there was no name on it that I didn’t want to cop. What more can you ask for at Christmas than that?
