Big Smile, No Teeth: Strange gifts of the Secret Santa

Christmas shopping has never been this interesting and bizarre ...

The holiday season is here! And that means we’re all probably taking part in a lot of Secret Santa-type gift exchanges. Which means we’re giving and receiving a lot of crap.

Secret Santa, in case you don’t know what it is, is the practice of exchanging gifts anonymously; names of the people involved are drawn from a pool and you have to get a gift for the person you draw, and you’ll also get something from someone in the pool. It’s very well known in North America but does operate in other countries under different names. It’s called Julklapp in Scandinavia, for instance; though in that tradition you leave a gift on someone’s doorstep and run away, presumably screaming “You just got julklapped!”.