Secret Santa: Who Are You Buying For This Year?
Posted: 2026 | Category: Community
A Bowl of Paper Slips
Every family that does Secret Santa knows the evening. Somebody tears a sheet of paper into strips, writes all the names on them, folds them and drops them in a bowl. Then the bowl goes round the table.
And then it starts. Your brother draws his own name. Your mother draws your father, again, like last year. The youngest can’t read yet and needs help, so now the helper knows. Half the family isn’t there because Christmas is at the in-laws this year, so somebody draws for them, and now that somebody knows too.
The best part of lootjes trekken is the moment you unfold yours. The rest is logistics.
The usual fix is a website that wants an account from everyone, sends the names in an email whose preview gives it away in the inbox, and shows the organiser the whole list “just in case”. At which point it is no longer a secret.
The Bowl, Without Its Problems
So we kept the bowl and took out the problems.
One person sets the family up once: the names, who lives together, and the children who have no email address yet, each through a parent. Then they press one button. Everyone gets an email with a personal link, and that link is their lootje. No account, no password, no app.
The draw knows the house rules:
- People who live together never draw each other. Nobody buys their own partner a surprise they picked out themselves.
- Nobody gets the same name as last year, when there is any other way.
- Exceptions are one click: “Piet never draws Oma”, for whatever reason the family has.
- Two people drawing each other is avoided in bigger groups, so it doesn’t turn into a swap.
When a setup can’t work, the draw doesn’t spin forever. It names the person who can’t be matched and why, so the organiser knows exactly which rule to loosen.
Kraft paper, red string, a tag with no name on it yet. The whole design starts here.
Nobody Knows, Not Even Us
The organiser is part of the family too, and they want to be surprised as much as anyone. So nobody can see who drew whom: not the organiser, not a co-organiser, and the server keeps it so that no screen or report can ever show the pairs. What the organiser does see is who has opened their lootje yet, and they can resend a lost link with one click.
The invitation never names the giftee, so an inbox preview spoils nothing. A child’s lootje goes to the parent in a separate email with the child’s name in the subject, so it can be handed over in person.
A Lootje You Unfold
Open the link and there it is: a slip of paper, folded in three and tied with string, dropping onto the screen. It sways until you tap it. Then the string unties, the paper unfolds, the name is written in, and it bursts into stars.
Folded and tied until you tap it. Nothing below it is shown until you do.
Under it: what your giftee would like. Everyone writes their own wishlist, with links and a rough price, so the guessing stops. And if the list says “something for the garden”, you can ask. Secret Santa and giftee can send each other messages, and the giftee never learns who is asking.
A week before the gift day, anyone who still hasn’t opened their lootje gets a gentle nudge.
It is read by grandparents on a phone as much as by teenagers, so the type is Atkinson Hyperlegible, made for people with low vision, every input is large enough not to zoom, and it speaks Dutch and English per person: Oma reads Dutch, the cousin in London reads English, in the same draw.
One Family, Several Draws
Families are not one group. The children draw among the children, the grown-ups among the grown-ups, the cousins have their own thing at New Year. So a family can run several draws at once, each with its own people, date, budget and note from the organiser. Next year, a new draw copies the rules from the last one, and the “not the same name again” rule looks at each person’s previous draw.
Built Like Everything Else We Build
Secret Santa runs on the same platform as our year-round products, Fastify and React with PostgreSQL, forked from our own boilerplate. Personal links are never stored in plain text. The draw is a pure function tested over thousands of seeded draws, so every rule holds every time. It went from first commit to live in a single evening, because the boring parts were already solved.
That is the same point Halloween made a month ago: when the platform is there, a family tradition becomes an app before the first Advent candle is lit.
Results
- One button to draw names for the whole family, every year
- Nobody sees the pairs, not even the organiser
- No accounts for anyone but the organiser: a personal link is the lootje
- Households, exclusions and last year all taken into account, with a clear answer when it can’t work
- Wishlists and anonymous messages between Secret Santa and giftee, in Dutch or English
- From first commit to live in one evening, on the shared Glueblue platform
Drawing names this year? Start your family on santa.glue.blue. Have a seasonal idea of your own? Let’s talk.