BY BRAD WESTMEYER
There’s many perks that come with the winter time. Winter break, snowball fights, hot chocolate and secret santa. There’s a lot that goes into the shopping of your giftee. How much to spend, where to go, and whether it should be meaningful or not. Here’s some tips and tricks on do’s and don’ts for your secret Santa this year.
- Don’t be the one who goes overboard – Most secret santa’s have a price limits for a reason. It’s always awkward for other people when one gift out does everyone else and makes it seem like their gift isn’t good. Although it might be awesome to go above and beyond and get your person the best gift, don’t. Keep it simple.
- Find out if it’s serious or not – Every secret santa has different groups and different expectations. Think about the people in your group and decide if they are jokesters or not. If you’re with your friends and someone gives their person scented candles, it’s going to be really weird when you got your person a Pandora bracelet.
- Shop at the right place – Again, figure out whether your secret Santa is serious or not and go from there. A great place to shop is Five Below in Kenwood. It’s a neat little store where everything is below five dollars and has plenty of gift ideas that are hard to go overboard with.
- Shop for your person – Finds some things out about your person. Not the cliche what sports they play. That’s always disappointing. If you’re going to give a what’s your favorite thing gift, get candy. You c
an’t go wrong with candy.
- Don’t freak out when you give them your gift – I get it, your gift that you picked out is awesome, but keep it calm, cool and collected. It gets really weird when all you can do is talk about the story of how you decided to get the gift.
- Receiving your gift is the easy part – You can’t really mess up here. Just avoid being the kid that got an avocado for Christmas and played it off like he loved it.
- Post gift giving – Check out your gift out at first, but put it aside after a while. If everybody else is hanging out and you’re messing around with your gift, first off, you’re missing out on what everyone else is doing and you have plenty of time to check out your gift later after everyone’s gone home. Second, it just weird, so stop.
- Get home, then freak out – If the gift you got is really all that amazing, tell your parents. Avoid bragging (or complaining) at the secret santa party, people talk and it’d be really awkward if it gets around to your secret Santa that you didn’t like their gift.