I tried to find the genius inventor of Secret Santa to say thank you

At this festive time of year, one’s thoughts turn to a great historical figure who led humanity out of the darkness and into the light. I’m talking, of course, about whoever invented the idea of the Secret Santa. This person rejuvenated Christmas for me; they reconnected me with the joy of giving, specifically the joy of only having to give things to one person instead of about 20. For my money – which this year is capped at $100 – Secret Santa is the greatest Christmas breakthrough since the invention of wrapping paper.

I say this because I’m old enough to remember what Christmas was like before the Secret Santa era. It was in serious danger of starting to suck. Whoever said it’s better to give than receive must have let their spouse handle the bulk of their Christmas shopping. I doubt they ever found themselves in a crowded megastore on Christmas Eve, holding a sweaty checklist with more names on it than a rugby team-sheet.

The Secret Santa model is about reciprocity, not altruism.Credit: Getty Images

Giving was never part of the equation when you were a kid, of course. For the first decade or so of your life, you ran a massive Christmas surplus. Gifts were things you received, and that was it. All you had to do at Christmas was show up, and presents would fly at you from all sides.

Then came the day when your parents announced that you were old enough to start giving presents too. At that moment, a dark shadow descended on the concept of the Christmas present.

Then, before you knew it, there was a new generation of kids around, and you were one of the grown-ups showering them with unrequited gifts. This was only right. It made Christmas feel magical again, from a whole new angle. The less magical thing was that you had to keep buying presents for the adults too. That gift surplus you’d enjoyed as a youngster had become a howling and eternal deficit.

And then some unsung genius invented the Secret Santa. Who was it? Where did the glorious concept come from? I recently put these questions to Google. The answers it gave me were, I’m afraid, less than convincing.

First it tried to tell me that the Secret Santa derives from a Swedish tradition known as Julklapp. Apparently the Swedes, in the 17th century, had an unusual way of distributing Christmas gifts. They would knock on their neighbours’ doors, open them, throw a gift inside, then run away before they could be seen.

Whoever said it’s better to give than receive must have let their spouse handle the bulk of their Christmas shopping.

Try as I might, I can’t see many parallels between this Nordic free-for-all and the crisp symmetries of the Secret Santa system. The Secret Santa involves no element of home invasion, for a start. Moreover, the Julklapp tradition seems to have featured no wish lists, no spending cap, no mechanism to ensure that if you tossed a quite pricey gift into your neighbour’s house, they would lob something of equal dollar value into yours.

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.

Loading

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?

Most Viewed in Lifestyle

Loading