The worst office Secret Santa gifts, an incomplete but painful list
An office gift exchange has a unique property: the recipient cannot leave. They have to open it, react, and then sit two metres from you until March.
With that in mind, here are twelve things people have genuinely given colleagues. Read it as a warning. Read it, ideally, before Thursday.
Category one: things from the cupboard
1. Company-branded anything. The fleece, the water bottle, the notebook with the logo. They already have four. They did not want the first one. You have given them a fifth reminder that they work here, which is a thing they know.
2. The mouse pad. Nobody has needed a mouse pad since roughly 2014, and the one you found in the stationery drawer is not the exception.
3. The conference tote bag. From a conference you attended. In 2019. It still has the lanyard in it.
Category two: things that are quietly appraisals
4. The book about productivity. “I got you this because I thought of you” is doing a spectacular amount of work in that sentence.
5. The desk plaque with a motivational quote. You have installed a small daily instruction on a colleague’s desk. It will face them for years. They cannot remove it, because you sit opposite.
6. The label maker. See above, but with adhesive.
7. The “world’s okayest employee” mug. A joke about mediocrity given to a person who did not ask to have a position on their own mediocrity.
Category three: things that are a logistics problem
8. The plant, in a hot-desking office. You have given somebody a living thing and nowhere to put it. It will be adopted by the kitchen and die by February, publicly.
9. The bottle of something, to a person you have never seen drink. In a team of twenty there is always at least one reason this misses, and you do not get to know which.
10. The scented candle in an open-plan office. Twice as much of a gift for everybody sitting near them, and none of them consented.
11. The gift card for the canteen downstairs. You have given a colleague their own lunch. They were going to buy that lunch anyway. The gift is that today it is free, which is somehow worse than nothing.
The undisputed champion
12. The gag gift about a colleague’s personal life. Their dating, their divorce, their diet, their car, the thing they said at the summer party. It arrives as a joke and lands as a note, and the whole room hears it land.
This is the one rule that actually matters, and it is why a worst-gift contest has rules: the joke goes on the object, never on the person holding it.
The thirty useful seconds
Most office gifts fail because they were bought on the way in, that morning, for somebody the giver knows by face only. That is not a character flaw — it is a scheduling problem.
Draw names two weeks out, keep the ceiling low, and give people time to notice one thing about the person they drew. An office exchange done that way produces gifts worth eleven euros and remembered for two years, which is a better return than anything in the cupboard.