Office Secret Santa without an office

[MrsPeacockDidIt]

Google is either not helping or what I need Doesn’t exist. Our office is closed and will remain so till at least next year. We want to still do a secret Santa but don’t want to give out employees home addresses if at all possible. We thought we could send them all to the HR person to post back out but that’s a lot of work for one person and also doubling up on postage.

Does anyone have an idea or know of a service that could help ?

The only think I can think of is everyone making their own Amazon wish list of a few items within budget. Then you could allocate a randomly chosen wish list to everyone and they could just send something from the list, no address needed.

Maybe the participants could name their nearest Amazon pickup location (corner shops, lockers,post offices) and the gifts could be sent to there and the pickup code forwarded to the recipient.

I was just looking at this virtual secret Santa app, and it looks like you only get the address of the person you are sending to, and as a return address you can put the organiser's or the office address on there to keep it secret.

www.elfster.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9Oirwsel7AIVyuvtCh3FZQSUEAAYASAAEgLUpvD_BwE

@msbevvy

Maybe the participants could name their nearest Amazon pickup location (corner shops, lockers,post offices) and the gifts could be sent to there and the pickup code forwarded to the recipient.

I was going to suggest this!

If I worked in hr I’d tell you to bugger off, they won’t have the time and inclination to repost bloody presents 😂

I work in HR. I would be livid if I was told I had to act as sodding Santa and resend 58 Christmas presents - I've got more than enough to do already!

Just don't. No secret Santa is the one good thing about 2020.

Agree with PP, release everyone from this torment.

You need to sacrifice one of your own team to handle the addresses. So you send an amazon link to her/him and then they arrange for it to be posted to the right person.

Get everyone to buy and wrap themselves a present and open them on zoom.

Use a "special online secret Santa service"

Explain that unfortunately there's no way to check that people don't get themselves.

Send everyone an email saying they got themselves as their secret santa.

Hurray, everyone saves on postage and gets something they might actually want. If anyone forgets then they only upset themselves.

What about some kind of email gift system instead? Do you have a small friendly team who actually like working together and giving gifts?

If so you could do something similar to an exercise we did on a training day once. You'd get everyone to write one short nice thing about every other person anonymously, then put each person's quotes into a personalised card which only they see.

(Before everyone leaps at once, don't get me wrong - in some teams this would be death or an exercise in subtle bullying. I'm also a very cynical person who found it cringeworthy to do. But it was surprisingly touching when everyone privately read their cards and we all seemed to get a boost.)

Another forum I'm on does a secret Santa and one of the requirements of joining is that you have to be ok about another forum user being given your address. So I would just make that a condition of joining and see who still wants to do it. It really wouldn't bother me, a colleague having my address.

I couldn't be arsed with a work secret Santa though. 😂

I’ve been part of a gift exchange and it was all done through Elfster. Really easy to use and no addresses exchanged etc.

www.elfster.com/

Does anyone really want secret santa this much? Just bin it.

We are not doing secret santa this year but we're all using the money we would gave spent to buy toys for a charity runs by health visitors to make sure kids in need have some presents in Christmas morning

Oh god surely the one good thing about 2020 is no secret Santa??

We use this SS generator and this year they've got a remote office option with data protection controls around address sharing etc to make sure only the SS gets to see the address.