Secret Santa Exposed!

Now's the time to squelch the idea of having a Secret Santa exchange in your office.

Miss Manners understands that the workplace adoption of this custom is meant to warm office relationships with an infusion of holiday cheer. That does not prevent it from being a perfectly dreadful idea.

She has ample testimony from her Gentle Readers about what a disaster it so often is. Apparently, the warmth arising after such exchanges is produced by human seething. On office time.

This is an activity that promises to bring out the worst in everyone.

Well, nearly everyone. There is always the well-meaning person who is determined to make everybody happy, and runs around the office blithely leaving cookies for dieters and diabetics, Christmas ornaments for non-Christians and turkeys for vegetarians. It is apt to be the same person who has organized the Secret Santa exchange, in addition to cajoling everyone to donate money to buy a handsome present for the boss.

As for the others, they are counting heavily on the secret part, regardless of their long knowledge that nothing has ever successfully remained a secret in that office. They all know who is seeing whom on the sly, how much others earn and who calls in sick but isn't.

So some find it an opportunity to unload objects that are used, obvious freebies or stuff that just comes close to being universally undesirable. Merchandise that first appeared in the office when an employee's child was assigned to sell it for school is a popular choice, Miss Manners is told.

Others take special care to target the specific colleagues they have drawn. The shy young lady at her first job is given a sweater several sizes too small. A gentleman known to be in a happy gay partnership is given lewd female underwear.

Although she tends to hear from those who were embarrassed or disappointed, Miss Manners knows that there are also generous people who go out of their way to find pleasantly suitable presents for their co-workers in these exchanges.

Unfortunately, they are apt to be paired with the cheesier Secret Santas.

But even if the system works, it creates undue pressure to spend time, money and thought pretending that these are social situations, where people come together through affection rather than chance.

Everyone commonly complains about how hard they find it to select presents to please their spouses and their parents. These are people they know intimately, with whom they have lived, whose possessions are as familiar to them as their own.