Susanna Beves was a young teacher working at an international school in Germany when she opened a gift that would put her off Secret Santas forever. The present itself, a solitaire game, “would have been quite nice in the normal circumstances,” she says. But it was accompanied by a note: “It told me that it had been chosen for me because I was single and lonely and likely to remain so, as I had no friends.”
“It was the most awful thing,” Beves, now 57, remembers. When she opened the gift, in a room full of 60 staff members, “I just wanted to cry,” she says. “Everybody was there and everybody was opening their gifts. So I knew that the person who’d written that note was in the room with me.”
The note came as a total shock. “It was a wonderful workplace with the most fantastic people. And I thought we all got on really well, and that I was liked.” To this day, Beves has no idea who it was from. Her memory of the rest of the day is blurry – “I’ve kind of blanked it” – but she is pretty sure she put the gift and the note straight in the bin: “I certainly didn’t take it home.”
Exchanging anonymous gifts with colleagues is supposed to be a bit of end-of-year fun, a way to spread some festive cheer. Best-case scenario, you’ll end up with a small but thoughtful gift – maybe something that references an in-joke you share with a colleague. Truly spiteful gifts like the one Beves received are rare, but it’s relatively common for gifts intended as jokes to miss the mark, says the managing director of Wellington HR consultancy, Shelley Poole. “I don’t want to be the HR fun police,” she says. “Because if you do it well, it can be fun. But I think sometimes people take things a bit far and they don’t necessarily think about the person who’s going to be opening the gifts.”
RM Block
When choosing a gift, Poole cautions against “playing it for laughs”, particularly if you’re poking fun at someone’s perceived flaws, by buying soap or deodorant for someone with strong body odour, for example, or headphones for someone who is considered too noisy. “That can lead to some people feeling pretty humiliated,” she says. “I’ve seen grievances come out of it.”
When someone is given a gift that is intended to be humorous, they may feel pressure to laugh along with their colleagues, even if, on the inside, they are very upset. That was the case for 59-year-old Tony O’Brien, when, as a young man, he took part in a Secret Santa at his first full-time job with the Northern Ireland Civil Service. At the time, he was still living with his mother, who bred dogs.
“One of her dogs gave birth to a litter of puppies. One of them was a white boxer, and they’re very unusual,” he says. “I fell in love with it and I asked my mum: could I buy the dog from her? And she said yes.” He wasn’t aware that white variations of the breed tend to be more susceptible to health and temperament problems – until one evening, while out on a walk, “she bit an old lady on the arm, completely unprovoked”, O’Brien says. Thankfully the victim wasn’t badly harmed, but he took the decision to have his beloved pet put down: “I couldn’t have a dog like that around me that would attack someone like that.”
He had shared all of this with his colleagues in the lead-up to Christmas. Much to his dismay, the person who selected his name in the Secret Santa ballot decided it was a good story to plan a jokey gift around – O’Brien received six tins of dog food, a packet of puppy training pads and two inflatable dogs. “I tried to pretend that I got the joke, but I was horrified,” O’Brien says. “It’s a horrible story. And why anybody would think to make light of it like that, especially in such a public way, was beyond me.”
Sometimes even the best-intentioned gifts end up being wildly inappropriate: Georgie Goldstein, who is 33 and works in education in London, “was laughing for probably about three minutes” after she opened a Secret Santa gift of a set of couples’ mugs. “Morning gorgeous” and “morning handsome” read the text on the mugs, which were clearly intended for Goldstein and her long-term partner. However, what the gift-giver didn’t know was that Goldstein’s relationship had ended shortly before the Secret Santa exchange took place. It was “a really, really terrible gift” that “hit a bit of a nerve”, Goldstein says, but “I could see the humour in it”.
People were using it as an excuse to get back at people that they didn’t like or had beef with
— Tony O’Brien
Geneva-based film-maker Rebekah Jorgensen, who is 73, also saw the funny side when she took part in a Secret Santa while working for an outdoor furniture company in West Hollywood. The gift exchange took place at a Christmas party to which she and her colleagues were allowed to bring their families: instead of buying gifts for specific people, anyone who brought a present could add it to a big pile, and take one in return. Jorgensen had brought her son Elliot, who was nine at the time. Everyone had to stand in a circle and open their gift one by one, and when it came to Elliot, he opened a pair of edible women’s underpants.
“Having no idea what they were,” says Jorgensen, “he held them up for all to see and said, ‘What am I supposed to do with these?’. When it suddenly dawned on him that edible means eatable, he had such a look of absolute disgust.” Thankfully, one of Jorgensen’s colleagues, who had received a packet of gourmet nuts, stepped in swiftly, and offered to swap gifts with him. “So it worked out very well,” Jorgensen says. “Nobody ever owned up” to buying the pants, she adds. “But it was very, very funny.”
Finding an appropriate gift to give isn’t the only challenge: the way you respond to the gift you have received can also cause conflict, as 62-year-old Ian from Salford, in the UK, learned the hard way. His closest friend from his office – whom he referred to as his “work wife” – didn’t speak to him for a month after he reacted negatively to the magnetic jigsaw she got him when she was assigned as his Secret Santa. Though he liked the puzzle, he had recently had a plastic-coated fridge installed in his kitchen, so he told everyone the gift was no good to him when he opened it. “She just turned around and she gave me absolute daggers, and I went: ‘Oh it was you, wasn’t it?’” Ian says. “That really soured the mood in the room.” It was only in the new year, after Ian had apologised several times, that his friend eventually forgave him. “I did have to grovel quite a lot,” he says – and he never dared tell her that when he took his present home and attempted to attach it to his fridge, it did actually stick.
Poole, who has been working in HR for more than 20 years, says she has dealt with many Secret Santa-related complaints throughout her career. Usually, encouraging colleagues to chat about it or apologise resolves the issue. But, she says, “what definitely isn’t the resolution is telling someone that they’ve had a sense of humour failure, because people are entitled to be upset”.
“I’ve seen cases where grievances have been upheld because it can constitute harassment,” she adds. “I’ve seen one situation where it was a very male-dominated industry, and there were only a couple of women working there, and one of the women had already made it known to the guys she was working with that she didn’t like sexual jokes. And she got bought a bondage kit in the Secret Santa.” As a result, the entire team underwent sexual harassment awareness training.
Any sexual gifts are best avoided, Poole advises, and notes “there are lots of things you might think are a safe gift”, such as chocolate, that, “if someone is conscious for whatever reason about what they’re eating, it can be difficult. Ditto alcohol”. She recommends talking to someone who knows the recipient well about what might be a good gift for them.
Bad Secret Santa experiences can stay with people forever: O’Brien thinks his poorly judged dog gifts “started me on the road to being very, very cynical about the people I work with”. For the rest of his career, “I really kept myself to myself. I shared very little about my personal life with anybody in work,” he says. Receiving the gift “did feed in” to his decision to move to a new department shortly afterwards, he says, “because I couldn’t really look my colleagues in the eye any more”.
O’Brien wasn’t alone in the Northern Ireland Civil Service in having a negative Secret Santa experience. “There were a few other incidents of inappropriate and nasty and spiteful Secret Santas that led to the decision in the Civil Service to ban Secret Santas completely,” he says. “People were using it as an excuse to get back at people that they didn’t like or had beef with.”
As well as complete bans, other measures that workplaces have put in place include making it compulsory to reveal the sender’s identity when the gift is opened, or giving recipients the option to provide a wishlist of gift ideas. Interestingly, Goldstein objects to Secret Santa wishlists, which are filled out ahead of the Secret Santa at her current workplace, despite the fact they could have saved her from receiving a disastrous gift. “The fun of Secret Santa is trying to guess who might have got you this gift,” she says. Even though being given couples’ mugs straight after a break up “was an absolute shit show”, it “actually formed part of a more interesting, more enjoyable, funnier conversation as a result”. The risk of getting a bad gift can be “part of the fun”, she thinks.
That’s as long as the gift isn’t an attack on your character, of course: Beves refused to participate in Secret Santas after she received her solitaire game, only caving years later on the condition that the name of the giver would be on the gift. “It upset me so much,” she says. She’s wary of gift-giving in general these days, which she admits may just be due to getting older and not wanting to accumulate belongings, but she says her Secret Santa experience has “quite possibly” exacerbated this view.
Secret Santas are “giving for the sake of giving in so many ways,” Beves says. “I don’t see the point really.” – Guardian
