Secret Santa

Secret Santa is a traditional UCSD Tzu Ching holiday event where members are randomly assigned a person to whom they anonymously give a gift.

Participants first create wishlists and answer anonymous questions before the actual date of the event in order to help decide on fun and personalized presents for each other. On the day of the actual gathering, participants take turns opening their gifts and guessing who their "Secret Santa" was. This event normally takes place towards the end of the Fall Quarter, before finals and before everyone goes home for Winter Break. Sites such as Elfster are often used to facilitate Secret Santa assignments and anonymous Q&A.

Details
Set-up At The Event
 * Decide on the spending limit and any other restrictions/guidelines that you would like to include for the event. Also consider whether you want to include a potluck, games, group activites, etc., along with the actual gift exchange.
 * Create a Facebook event and invite people to attend, making sure to include the details from step 1 in the description.
 * Set a strict deadline for signing up. It is difficult to change the Secret Santa assignments after they have already been made, as it is possible that some people have already started shopping for their specific person, or have already bought a gift.
 * If using Elfster, one of the organizers should now make an account and a new gift exchange on the site. Ask participants to both RSVP to the Facebook event and sign up for a free Elfster account to join your new gift exchange.
 * Once the deadline has come, randomly assign Secret Santas and inform participants of who they have been assigned to.
 * Elfster: before initiating the assignments, add any "draw restrictions" that you would like (a feature that allows you to disallow certain participants from being assigned to certain other participants, for whatever reason). Then, click on the "Draw Names" button to create the final assignments. Once this is done, when participants log in to their accounts, they will be shown who they are a Secret Santa for.
 * As guests arrive at the event, ask them to discreetly drop their gifts off at a designated "gift area" (ideally in a corner of the room or somewhere not easily visible to guests). Participants should not see who brought which gift, and gifts should only have the name of the person to whom the gift belongs, NOT who it is from.
 * One way to partially avoid revealing who brought which gift is to ask participants to bring their gifts in paper/store bags to hide the gift wrapping.
 * When ready to begin, collect all the gifts and place them in the middle of the room. If gifts were brought in bags to hide them, gifts should now be removed from the bags. Have everyone gather around the pile, and decide on who will be the first to look through the pile for their gift.
 * The first person to go searches for their gift from the gift pile. Once they have found their gift, they open it and show it to everyone.
 * After opening the gift, the person has a certain number of tries to guess who their Secret Santa was. If any of their guesses are correct, or once they have run out of guesses, then their Secret Santa reveals himself/herself (photos of the pair with the gift are a good idea!)
 * The Secret Santa who has just been revealed should then be the next person to search for the gift. This process continues until everyone has unwrapped their presents.

Past Secret Santas
Facebook event pages for previous Secret Santas:
 * 2014: https://www.facebook.com/events/315628838638198/
 * 2013: https://www.facebook.com/events/527182717372305/
 * 2012: https://www.facebook.com/events/169851029822932/
 * 2011: https://www.facebook.com/events/223273887742194/