Home/ Questions/Q 65711
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-10T18:59:21+00:00

Each year at Thanksgiving, my family has drawn names out of a hat to

  • 0

Each year at Thanksgiving, my family has drawn names out of a hat to determine who they’ll be a ‘Secret Santa’ for the Christmas gift exchange. It’s important to our family culture that no one else in the family knows who each other got in order to keep it interesting. The only rule to the selection is that you can’t pick your spouse. If that happens, you draw again and put your spouse’s name back in the hat.

Due to logistics and travel plans this year, we’re celebrating Christmas early (only two weeks after Thanksgiving).

In order to allow for plenty of time to look for gifts, we’d like to select names now. Our family is located across the U.S.A. Some members have access to the Internet and some don’t (e.g. my dear Grandma).

What I would like to do is have a fair protocol that simulates drawing names out of a hat and ensures some level of secrecy without being overly complex. Some websites, like the former drawnames.com or others like it usually require people to put in their email address. I want to make absolutely sure that my family’s email addresses don’t get abused so I don’t want to trust them to another site.

The best protocol I can come up with is:

  1. Write a program that randomly picks people and ensures people don’t get their spouse.
  2. The program will show me half the list but will not show me who got my name, but will show me whose name I have and the person who got my wife’s name.
  3. Then, I will leave the room and the program will display the other half of the list of people to my wife (which will include who has my name).
  4. My wife and I will then contact each person and tell them who they have.

Am I missing a better protocol? By better, I mean something that would allow more secrecy. Again, due to logistics and to keep things simple, I don’t want to have to build a website.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. On OS X it is very easy to take advantage of the Text-to-speech engine, just by calling the ‘say ‘ command line utility. There are also ways to do this in windows as well.

    SO you could ring up whoever is on your list, tell them to listen for who they should buy a gift for, and put a headphone from the computer up to the telephone, as you tell your program to say the name associated with the person you are calling. They can then tell you if they heard it clearly and that it wasn’t their spouse.

    • 0