secret santa

The tentative Crabby(TM) for Best Christmas-Related Web Idea goes to Secret Santa. Yep, it’s just like you remember it from grade school, except your gift gets chosen from your Amazon wish list instead of the fevered imagination of a 12-year-old.
I remember my first and only Secret Santa experience, sometime around eighth grade. We had a $10 spending limit, but were supposed to buy three things to give over three days. The guy I had picked was into music, so I hatched a brilliant scheme: buy two really crappy gifts for the first two days, to fool him into thinking he was getting screwed over, then spring a shiny new tape from one of his favorite bands on Day 3. (I remember the tape well: Pink Floyd’s Animals.) So on Days 1 and 2, he got books straight from the 50-cent shelf at a Lafayette, La. bookstore — I think one was on raising goats, maybe the other one was a Victor Borge bio, I don’t remember.
Anyway, so this guy spends two straight days complaining about how crappy his gifts are to everyone within earshot. I felt like explaining: Don’t you get irony? The humor inherent in intentionally bad gifts, soon to be redeemed by a slice of Floyd? By the time Day 3 arrived, I was completely disspirited, and the guy wasn’t all that impressed — he already had a copy of Animals.
So everybody sign up for Secret Santa, on the off chance we might pick each other and I might have a healing experience.