Secret Santa: Your Secret Weapon against a Crappy Consumerist Christmas
I’m not exactly famous for being a minimalist, and I’ve definitely had my bouts of consumeristic fever in which I must have bought half of Amazon. But most of the time, I feel like I try to rein it in (although my spouse might have something to say about that).
One area where my entire clan has been trying to rein it in is the big CCC: Capitalist Christmas Craziness. When I was a kid, I used to call Christmas “present day” because that’s exactly what it was. My siblings and I got all of Santa’s best stuff — cellphones and go-karts and bikes, oh my! It was a smorgasbord of preadolescent avarice.
As we got older, unfortunately, we all started to wind up on the other end of the Christmas present stick. Suddenly, we were having to buy presents instead of just receiving them, and we all found ourselves at the business end of a list of dozens of people for whom we had to purchase gifts. As a kid, I never understood why people always got so stressed around the holidays, but I somehow wrapped my head around it as my list of present recipients kept on growing.
However, a strange thing started happening as my siblings and I got older. We got jobs, got into relationships, and all the things we wanted, we started buying for ourselves, which made finding Christmas presents for everyone even harder. It eventually came down to a choice between buying cheap shit nobody wanted or spending thousands of dollars we didn’t have.
It was at this point my mom decided to institute Secret Santa for the whole family. I think she was expecting some resistance, but I wasn’t surprised at all when everyone happily agreed to get off the Christmas merry-go-round and actually have a merry Christmas. Now, everybody in the family gets one present and gives one present based on their random selection. We have a minimum and maximum budget range to ensure everyone gets a good gift and no one goes overboard, but the best present of all has been getting our lives back during the month of December. Here are just a few of the ways Secret Santa has saved our Christmas and can save yours too!
Santa’s Secret to Saving Time
Of course, the Secret Santa benefit you’ll notice first is the fact that you’re not blowing the whole month of December surfing Amazon and Etsy or sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in one strip mall parking lot after another. No more standing in line. No more fighting other Black Friday shoppers for the last piece of plastic crap. No more sprinting through the door two minutes before closing. The second you institute Secret Santa, all of that just goes away.
Not only does this give you more free time to actually enjoy some of this alleged holiday cheer everybody’s always talking about, but it also gives you the ability to spend a few more hours or days with the people you used to shop for all season. As it turns out, most people appreciate that more. And hey, if your family would rather you spend your time sweating it out under the weight of all their presents instead of baking cookies or watching Christmas movies with them, do they actually deserve all those gifts?
Santa Secretly Keeps Money in Your Pocket
Though I’m now spending a lot more money on one single gift than I ever have in the past, the fact that I’m not buying them for 30 people anymore means I’m saving 90% of the money I used to blow buying Christmas gifts. I no longer have to go without during the month of January, and I no longer spend New Year’s Eve worrying about what the credit card statement is going to look like. The best part is I also don’t feel like I’m pissing away my money buying the people I love shit that I have a strong inclination they probably don’t want. This leads into the next benefit of the Secret Santa extravaganza!
Secret Santa Helps with More Meaningful Gifts
When I used to Christmas shop for lots of people, I always felt restricted in what I could buy because I was spending money on so many different gifts. That meant everybody got something, but nobody got anything they really wanted.
Money wasn’t the only issue, though. Buying presents for so many people also sucks up a lot of time and mental bandwidth. That used to mean nobody in my family could really put a lot of thought or effort into a single gift. We had to get our list checked off, and finding amazing and meaningful gifts took a back seat to that. Now that we’re all getting only one gift, we can put all our energy and money into making sure it’s the perfect fit for our Secret Santa recipient.
Santa’s Secret Reduces Holiday Stress
It should come as no surprise that when you’re keeping more money in your pocket and not spending your entire month running around like a chicken with your head cut off, your stress levels stay a lot lower. I still host and cook for Christmas, so there’s still cleaning and prepping that has to be done, but now I’m not adding multiple shopping days as well as at least a whole day of gift wrapping into that mix. This keeps my stress levels to a minimum and gives me more time for things I actually enjoy, like decorating and making delicious food.
Santa Could Secretly Disrupt Corporate America
One of the benefits of the Secret Santa setup that I didn’t think about right away but has certainly occurred to me as I’ve spent a few more years watching the Black Friday madness unfold on TikTok is the fact that Christmas has now become synonymous with corporate greed. Virtually everyone knows the adage that Black Friday puts retailers “in the black,” for the year. While this is not entirely true, what is true is that Christmas shopping helps just about every major corporate retailer in the country turn a massive profit whilst simultaneously exploiting their exhausted and run-down workforce. While retail employees run themselves ragged, retail CEOs laugh all the way to the bank.
Of course, my little circle adopting our own personal Secret Santa tradition won’t change this, but if everybody’s little circle started doing it, we might just be able to take back the winter solstice holiday from the capitalist parasites currently sucking the life out of it. The moderation of the consumer is not something this system is built to sustain, so a year of everyone in the country getting only one Christmas present is bound to make a splash. I’m not sure what would happen if everyone spent Black Friday and the month of December enjoying free activities with their families instead of spending money they don’t have, but it would certainly get corporate America’s attention.
The Secret to Santa
Maybe doing a personal Secret Santa wouldn’t work for your family. Maybe you worry you’ll break your kids’ hearts, or they won’t understand why they’re getting just a single present this year. Maybe they’re too young for such a massive change just yet. I’m not a parent and never will be, so I won’t regale anyone with tales of how kids don’t need two dozen presents apiece every Christmas. Lots of parents love watching their kids’ faces light up on Christmas morning when they come down to see what Santa brought. If that sounds like you, by all means, disregard this whole article.
On the other hand, if you want to untether holiday magic from crass consumerism, if you’re sick of breaking your back for ungrateful children or watching their expensive plastic toys wind up (not) rotting in a landfill before the next Christmas, if you’re tired of waking up on New Year’s Day to an astronomical credit card bill, if you’re ready to buy back your holiday time without eliminating gifts altogether, Secret Santa could just be your Yuletide escape hatch.
Merry Saturnalia, everyone!
