Is Secret Santa stressing you out? Here’s your holiday gift-exchange survival guide
Secret Santa gift exchanges among friends, family or co-workers can be a fun way to get in the holiday spirit
The commencement of the holiday season often means the lengthening of to-do lists.
There are lights to hang, cards to mail, cookies to bake and, of course, gifts to buy. Gift exchanges, whether they’re among friends, family or co-workers, can be a fun way to get in the holiday spirit. But can also be another stressor during a busy time of year.
Secret Santa exchanges — where participants are assigned a gift recipient and tasked with finding them a perfect present within a price limit — sometimes mean that those in friend groups are paired with “frenemies,” someone inevitably draws themselves, or colleagues who are virtually strangers are matched up.
Those possible pitfalls inspired Peter Imburg to create Elfster, a free online Secret Santa organizer, after he saw the time and effort it took to coordinate the logistics of a gift exchange with his family over 20 years ago.
More top-down organization, he says, helps things run more smoothly.
Elfster, for instance, creates pairings, asks for wish lists, offers gift suggestions at different price points and sends reminders, among other features meant to make the organizational hurdles of a gift exchange less daunting.
“The organizer is like the hero. They make it all happen," Imburg said, adding that his site aims «to make it a lot easier for the organizer to do that with a minimal amount of effort.”
Cameron Rogers, a New Jersey-based social media content creator and podcast host on wellness and motherhood, understands the stress that gift exchanges can bring up.
“Having to give generic gifts to people I’m not necessarily close with is extremely difficult,” Rogers
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