Most Secret Santa gifts that go wrong go wrong the same way: somebody draws a name they barely know, has a budget and two weeks, and buys a candle. Nobody is being lazy. The giver simply has nothing to go on, and a candle is what you buy when you know nothing about a person. A questionnaire fixes that before it starts, because it asks the person who knows best — the one receiving the gift.
The questions that do the most work are not the ones about likes. They are the ones that rule things out. "Please, no" and "something you already have plenty of" remove the commonest mistakes in one line each, and the allergy question removes the worst one. Sizes come next, and only where clothes are allowed: the office set leaves them out, because most people would rather not tell a colleague their shoe size. The short wish list goes last, on purpose. Three named things are a safe answer until they sell out; everything above them is what a giver falls back on.
The questionnaire is the half of a Secret Santa that happens before the draw. Our Secret Santa generator is the other half: it draws the names, keeps couples and anyone else apart, and gives each person their own link with the budget and the date on it. Each name there has a hint box, and the best line from that person's sheet is what belongs in it — whoever draws them sees it the moment their gift unwraps.
If the exchange is one line among many in December, the gift list it belongs to has its own page. Planning Christmas gifts covers the budget-per-person method, and our free printable Christmas planner puts the gift list, the dinner and a six-week countdown on three sheets, so the Secret Santa takes one line instead of a whole evening.
