It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas... well it is! [img]smile.gif[/img] And I thought, to celebrate the festive season and giving and all that stuff, we at IW could do a secret santa.
For those who don't know what a secret santa is, basically when you have a large group of people who give gifts to each other at Christmas, if everyone gets everyone else a gift you all end up with lots of cheap crap that you don't want. So instead, everyone puts their names in a hat and picks one person out in secret to give a gift to, so that you can spend as much on one person that you would spend on everyone - so everyone gets one great gift instead of a bunch of small crap. And it's all the more fun because it's a secret - no one knows who is getting a gift for who else until everyone gets together to distribute the gifts.
So, I think this will translate to IW quite well - hopefully lots of people will join in and it will be lots of fun. But gifts! The real beauty of the online thingy, is that you can't actually BUY anyone a gift, you'd be just giving them a gift IDEA - describing what you would give to whoever you get as your secret santa recipient. I think that the best and worst part about gift giving is coming up with the gift - I can often think of something great and totally appropriate and personalised to a person, but it is ridiculously expensive or unavailable or otherwise ungettable. With giving a gift idea, you don't have to worry about whether it's totally expensive or not even attainable with stacks of money. So, the gift idea you give to your secret santa recipient can be as outrageous as you like - a holiday to somewhere they've always wanted to go, season tickets and a meeting with their favourite sporting team, or even something silly and fantasy-based like a sword of smiting annoying work colleagues. And it doesn't have to be personalised, because obviously you might not know whoever you get as your secret santa recipient that well, but it can still be cool and fun [img]smile.gif[/img] .
So, basically I'm thinking it will work like this. In this thread people can indicate if they want to be part of it. Then after a few days when no one else seems to want to join in, I'll randomly pick who's giving gifts to who. Then I'll PM everyone who's involved with the person they are giving a gift to. Then on about the 20th of December, I'll make another thread where everyone 'gives' their gift - posts who they were giving a gift to and what it is. I'm hoping lots of people will join in - if there's only a few then I won't go ahead with it, but hey, I think it will be fun, and it's not exactly a huge commitment - just check your pms in a week or so and then be around sometime before Christmas to give your gift - and read all about the gift you've been given, of course!
So, post here if you want to be involved, or if you have any suggestions. And yeah, even if you don't celebrate Christmas, I'd love you to join in anyway. It's not really a Christmas thing so much as a friend thing [img]smile.gif[/img] . Sorry the post was so long, but hey, if you can't manage to read a few paragraphs of generally coherent text maybe this concept is too much for you anyway
