As a lifelong Chicagoan, I have a lot of baseball hats that I’ve been wearing for a long time, showing off my love for the White Sox. I have hats I’ve been playing softball in for years. Running hats. Hats for just lounging on the deck and grilling in the heat of a sweltering August. You know what I don’t have a hat for? Reaching your hand in to pick names for a gift exchange. I mean, granted, any of…
There’s a secret sauce to everything meaningful. Back in the day, the secret sauce for me was the ever-popular Big Mac sauce. There was nothing like it, and I ate it too often. Otherwise, secret sauce represents a unique feature or special quality that ensures a successful process. So, for a gift exchange, the secret sauce could be how you draw names or ways to set up everything just right to make your event special. Sometimes the most special moments…
Years ago, when preparing for a Secret Santa, we were drawing names out of a hat in my parent’s house. My uncle had made a big deal out of printing everyone’s name on squares that were the exact same size so that there could be nothing out of place. His perfect scheme was foiled a bit when he drew his own name, and started to put it back. It turned out that everyone had drawn his name. When making the…
For someone who spends most of my professional time online, I used to be weirdly resistant to doing things on the computer. Maps? I was good with paper maps (even though it was super inconvenient). Finding a restaurant? Let’s drive around until we see something (even though we’d usually end up getting frustrated and grabbing fast food). Remembering the name of a movie? Instead of looking it up, have you tried not remembering and just going crazy? Needless to say,…
“Random” is one of those words that carries an air of, well, chaos. If you do something randomly, it seems like you’re doing it without rhyme or reason. Even its old definition, which meant “rushing headlong” and “going too fast,” implied a certain level of helter-skelter. So while random might be fun, it doesn’t always seem… practical. That can be a challenge when you’re doing things randomly, like drawing names for a gift exchange. There’s just a lot that can…
A few years ago, we were doing an office Secret Santa and were pulling names out of a hat. When my friend Hedda reached in to pull the last name, she fished through it before announcing that there weren’t any names left. We couldn’t find it and had to start over. A few days later, the owner of the hat said it had been caught in a flap. He found it when it finally fell out. I’m not trying to…
Trading gifts with friends, family, and coworkers is so much fun that it’s hard to imagine how it could get any better. But surprisingly, it can! You can make your next gift exchange party more fun by using a draw names from a hat app. Sure, there’s an app for everything these days. But a gift exchange app really does solve a lot of problems and can make your next party go a lot smoother. How Does a Draw Names…
One Thanksgiving, when I was just a kid—so a very, very long time ago—we were drawing names out of a hat for our Christmas gift exchange. My uncle, with great fanfare, reached in… and immediately drew his own name. He laughed, made a corny uncle joke, and picked again. It was his wife. He made another joke, but you could see his eyebrow start twitching. He reached in again… He picked one of his kids. Three draws, three people he…
My cousin, Laura, is probably one of the world’s worst Secret Santa players. She gets amazing gifts and is one of the warmest and funniest people I know. But every year, when we’d draw names from a hat, she would look directly at the person whose name she pulled. She tried not to. You could see beads of sweat forming as she struggled not to look up. But then she would, glancing directly at the person. It was wonderful. Of…
It used to be that every Thanksgiving, during the post-feast repose, we’d draw names for Secret Santa. People would write down their names and three gifts they wanted. We’d toss it all into a hat or bowl, mix it up, and pass it around the table to draw. It was always fun seeing people look at their names and laugh or look around trying to play it cool. It was a fun tradition. That’s why, when we moved to a…
Recently, we hosted a barbeque and decided to play horseshoes. We were going to divide teams by drawing names out of a hat, so I volunteered my old trusty White Sox cap. My wife looked at me for a full two seconds before declaring that maybe we’d use a “less comprehensively sweaty” way of picking teams. That made sense. And it illuminated something important: when you’re drawing names from an actual hat, you need an actual hat, with all its…
A few years ago, my wife and I hosted a tree trimming party. We had never done one before, so we looked up how to make our tree trimming party fun and memorable. Our guests were excited because we were one of the few in our circle of friends who had a real tree. So, perhaps carried away by the scent of pine (okay, and the egg nog), we expanded the party by adding a Secret Santa gift exchange. What…