How to win at Stealing Santa

To me a "win" is giving a great present to someone who'll enjoy it, and not being wasteful. That can be tricky with these games.

What is Stealing Santa?

It's a version of secret santa played at workplaces or in extended families. Each person contributes a gift, and draws a number to determine the order of play.

Player one selects a gift and opens it. Each following player opens a gift and can keep it or (forcibly) swap it with any already-opened gift. The last player has the choice of all the gifts.

Why I hate this game

Clearly it runs totally against the idea of buying a present for a specific person who you have thought about and brought something that would suit that person. Also, giving gifts for an unknown recipient often results in unwanted and wasteful purchases, sometimes thrown away.

Why I love this game

If played well, the worst outcome is neutral and the best outcome can be someone getting a gift they love. What? Let me explain.

My wife didn't want to go in this game at her office, for very good reasons about waste and consumerism. But there's office social pressure to join in, so we devised a winning strategy so that she can take part in the social aspect but without the negative consequences.

What to contribute

I heard some people take along a gift they want themself. When their turn comes, they either pick it from the pile, or swap for it.

Our variation is that my wife took a re-gift - it's a really great gift but something she already had one of. (That's win number one - no extra consumerism required).

When her turn came, she picked it from the pile and explained what it was. It turned out to be the perfect present for someone else. When their turn came, they quickly swapped to get it.

Success. The gift ended up in the hands of someone who really wanted it, will put it to good use and get great value from it.

A double win

Apart from finding a good home for the re-gift, my wife also ended up with a present that she likes and will use.

That was an extra bonus, not in our plan. We think the solar light will work well for our balcony. If not, it can always go back into the game next year ;)

A word about re-gifting

Sometimes a gift is a good idea, but you already have the exact same thing. Or it doesn't suit you for a particular reason, that the giver wouldn't know. Sometimes we sell these items (get our tips for that) but re-gifting is another option.

Comments

What to do with 128 pens?

I never need buy a pen again. Ever. The pen round-up. I searched the house for pens and gathered them up. We had 128. Woah - that's more than I expected. Then it was test-time. (You can get a lot done watching summer sport ;). Good ones went on the table. Broken ones in the box. Pen operations I saved a few 'broken' pens, by taking working insides and matching them with functional outsides. Particularly much-loved pens, for sentimental reasons, were given a life-extending 'ink transplant'. Final Tally We ended up with 67 broken pens and 61 good ones. And about 10 pencils. What to do with 67 broken pens? In my city Biome recycles pens . It's as easy as taking them into the store and dropping them into the giant collection box. Decluttering and recycling together - I love it. A lifetime of pens An average pen writes 45,000 words. So that dedicated shopping list pen on the fridge could write a 20-word shopping list for 43 years. Our 61 pens repre...

How to waste a year's wages

A friend recently asked me why it is that so many people (on good incomes) are struggling to save. Often the big three money areas are housing, transport and food. In one sense these are necessary items. But what we spend on them is often way more than necessary. I crunched some numbers on how much extra my wife and I could spend on these things - if for some reason we wanted to burn our money. 1. Housing Our apartment is fairly nice, but also cost-effective. I've mentioned how choosing it saves us $1,800 per year , compared to a similar one we saw. The high end of 2-bedroom apartments in our suburb is $305 per week more than our apartment. Not $305 per week. $305 per week more than ours is. I cannot get over that. Sure it's new and modern-looking, but that's a lot of money. It's an extra $15,860 per year above what we pay. 2. Transport The Australian Automobile Association lists the costs of owning and running a car. It includes many often-overlooked c...

Why millionaires don't "feel" rich

We're wealthier than ever - so why don't we feel like it? Australia has gone almost three decades without recession. The stock market recently hit a record high. Our wages are record highs. Home loan rates are at record lows. We live in one of the richest countries in the world at the richest point in history. So what's wrong? Comparison Wealth is relative. So what do we compare to? Where we expect to be? "When your wages growth is only 2 or 3 per cent, you don't feel as well-off as when it's going up 10 per cent. That's that nominal distortion that people often suffer from" , says economist Shane Oliver, and that "expectations have grown a lot faster than reality." We're earning more than last year, but we want even more. So compared to our imaginary situation, we see ourselves as worse off. What we see around us? Shane Oliver again. "If you think about it - Australians today are a lot wealthier. They're living far ric...

But wait... there's less!

Search This Blog