by Dan Copp
I don’t participate in Secret Santas anymore. I just don’t.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Grinch, and I don’t have anything against the holidays. I just avoid Secret Santa gift exchanges like the plague because the last one I participated in still makes me break out in hives.
I’ve never been officially diagnosed with Secret Santa trauma, but I’m fairly certain I have the symptoms.
And for good reason.
My wife later told me I had it coming, but I insist there were good intentions involved. The whole affair blew up in my face, and it could’ve happened to anyone.
Just hear me out.
The trauma began like every other Secret Santa, with little slips of paper dropped into a bucket at the office in Baton Rouge. Each participant drew a name, and just like that, we were assigned a coworker to shower with manufactured holiday generosity.
The name I drew was Mary.
The only information I had about her was what she’d written on the slip of paper. She worked on the fourth floor in accounting and liked savory snacks and LSU sports.
It wasn’t much, but I could work with it. After all, how difficult could it be to buy cheap presents for someone who loves junk food and football?
Human Resources had established a few ground rules. We were given a $25 spending limit and instructed to give our recipients four gifts, one on each day. The first three were to be delivered in secret. On the fourth day, we would reveal our identities by bestowing the final gifts in person.
Organized gift exchanges come with an unspoken rule: Your presents shouldn’t look or feel cheap. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a financial position that year to splurge on gifts, especially for someone I didn’t know. Hell, I could barely afford to buy my wife anything that year. The trick was to find gifts that looked respectable without breaking the bank.
Easier said than done.
I turned to my go-to destination for such occasions—Dollar Tree—where I assembled what could generously be described as a motley collection of holiday bargain-bin treasures: a snowman coffee mug, a generic knockoff of Uno called Um, a Christmas tree jigsaw puzzle, and a cookbook titled The Art of Turkey.
The entire haul cost less than five dollars, including tax. I patted myself on the back for my thriftiness and for spending even less than I had the previous year.
On the first day of the exchange, I arrived at the office about 20 minutes early so I could sneak the ersatz Uno game onto Mary’s desk without being seen. I had no idea what she looked like, and I wasn’t particularly interested in finding out. As an introvert, the less interaction, the better. My only goal was to deliver the goods and skedaddle.
To my relief, Mary’s cubicle was vacant. Like a Cold War spy delivering microfilm to the Secret Service, I surreptitiously placed the deck of cards on her desk and made a beeline for the elevator.
When I returned to my workstation, I discovered an ornate gift bag waiting in the swivel office chair.
The bag contained a bottle of Meiomi Pinot Noir, a box of Twinkies, and a $15 gift card to Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. The Twinkies were the only item I’d specifically listed on my wish list.
I stared at my new acquisitions in confusion. Had I missed something? Wasn’t there supposed to be a $25 budget? Math isn’t my strongest suit, but this clearly cost more than that.
It’s not that I was ungrateful, but I felt like a cheap bastard. There I sat, accepting gifts from an anonymous coworker who apparently believed Christmas was a competitive sport while I distributed dollar-store knickknacks like someone who hands out Great Value candy corn on Halloween.
On day two, I made a judgment call that would seal my fate. Instead of giving Mary only the Christmas tree puzzle, as I’d intended, I threw in the Raising Cane’s gift card from my previous haul to make her present look less cheap. Was that wrong?
After delivering the second present, I once again found a decorative gift bag waiting at my desk. This one contained a bag of Reese’s Cups (another item from my wish list), a s’mores-making kit, and a $50 Amazon gift card.
It was another huge haul that made me feel even more self-conscious. So, on the third day, I not only gave Mary the snowman coffee mug, but I also tossed in the s’mores kit and Reese’s Cups for good measure. No one would have to know I was regifting things I’d received from another Secret Santa. It was the thought that counted. I was paying it forward and saving money at the same time.
When I returned to my cubicle, another gift bag awaited me. Inside were a dozen freshly baked cookies from a local bakery, a box of Vosges Haut-Chocolat truffles, and a $75 gift card to Papa John’s!
I was no longer merely impressed by my Secret Santa’s generosity. I was becoming disturbed by it. This was getting out of hand. How far were we going to take it? And we still had one more present to give.
I imagined Mary opening The Art of Turkey and wondering what she’d done to deserve a book that looked as though it had been marked for clearance sometime during the George W. Bush administration.
After the cornucopia of gifts my anonymous benefactor had showered on me, it just didn’t feel right. So, I picked the most ornate gift bag I’d received that week and stuffed it with the cookbook, the chocolate truffles and the Papa John’s gift card to boot.
On the final day of the exchange, I took the elevator straight to the fourth floor to deliver Mary’s last gift and reveal myself as her Secret Santa. I psyched myself up to endure whatever awkward pleasantries and small talk the occasion warranted. I’ve always cringed at this part of the whole affair. I wish Secret Santas could remain anonymous forever because they’re awkward enough as it is. They put everyone on the spot during the reveal, forcing people to pretend they’re thrilled with a gift they probably wouldn’t have picked out for themselves.
I approached Mary’s cubicle and found a middle-aged woman with graying hair and thick-rimmed glasses hunched over her workstation. It was casual Friday, so she was wearing slacks and an LSU jersey. I tapped lightly on the side of her cubicle, and she turned from her monitor.
“Hi, are you Mary?” I asked.
“That’s me.”
“I’m Dan. I was your Secret Santa this week. I just wanted to drop off your last present.”
I awkwardly handed her the bag, trying to look like a man who had put considerable thought and money into its generous contents.
Mary accepted it with a wry grin.
“Well, what do ya know,” she said. “I’m also YOUR Secret Santa. What are the odds of that? I’ve been doing these gift exchanges for like 11 years, and that’s gotta be a first.”
She reached for another shiny gift bag on her desk and handed it to me.
For a moment, the world seemed to stop.
Mary.
Out of 200 participants in the building, we’d randomly drawn each other’s names from the bucket.
The woman whose gifts I’d been accepting all week with the enthusiasm of a lottery winner.
The woman who’d made me feel like a cheapskate.
The woman whose gifts I’d been returning to her without knowing it, all while taking credit for her big heart.
I’d managed to turn Secret Santa into Dirty Santa in one fell swoop.
My memory of the next few seconds is hazy due to a sudden bout of lightheadedness. I wanted to melt into the carpet, crawl into a ventilation duct, or fake a heart attack. Anything to take shelter from that Category 5 cringe storm.
Her magnified eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses seemed to bore into mine, forcing me to look away. Was there accusation in them, or did I just imagine it? We exchanged pleasantries as I contemplated my escape.
Mary asked me something, but I didn’t hear what it was. There was no graceful way out. No clever explanation. No opportunity to claim I’d planned the whole thing as some elaborate holiday prank. I was stuck.
Praying she wouldn’t broach the subject, I thanked her for the gifts and made a mad dash for the elevator.
As the doors closed, an instrumental version of Wham!’s “Last Christmas” played softly over the intercom. When the elevator door opened to the parking garage, I realized I had missed my floor because I never pressed the button. I had become lost in contemplation of the cosmic joke that had just been played on me.
My heart was in the right place, I kept telling myself. But the more I thought about it, the more selfish and cringe-inducing the whole thing seemed. I’d essentially been taking credit for Mary’s generosity to make myself look better. And it had backfired in spectacular fashion.
Would I have felt less guilty if I’d drawn someone else’s name? Maybe there is an alternate universe where that happened. But I’m stuck in this universe, where Mary opened a gift bag to find her Papa John’s gift card and chocolate truffles like a package that had been returned in the mail.
The embarrassment was so consuming that I haven’t participated in a Secret Santa since. Every time the holidays come up, the hives start up again.
I decided that was the best way to do my penance.
Dan Copp is a freelance writer and former journalist who has written multiple articles and is the author of Fascist Lizards from Outer Space: The Politics, Literary Influences and Cultural History of Kenneth Johnson’s V. He has taught writing at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, where he lives with his wife and 10-year-old daughter.
