Try doing secret Santa when 39 family members gather in one house | Séamas O'Reilly
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Giving and receiving presents is all very nice, but when you’re dealing with big numbers, you need to have a system. My family obeys a fairly strict Secret Santa protocol, rendered necessarily complex by said family’s sheer scale. By the time you read this, we will already have had our annual O’Reilly Christmas meet-up, in which my entire family descend on one house, en-masse. My wife and I have always escaped this duty because our home, though spacious enough for the four of us, would collapse into the centre of the Earth if my 10 siblings, my cousin Caraiosa, our partners, and our combined 19 kids, came calling.
For the second year in a row, we’ll be in Worthing. This time it’ll be at my sister Dearbhaile’s, having been at Mairead’s house nearby in 2023. Both are spacious, with the handy bonus of large upstairs areas where the kids can decamp while the adults assassinate each other’s character and get respectably pissed downstairs. This only posed minor problems last year, when our, perhaps lightly supervised, children became increasingly sugar-deranged and were subsequently discovered, having wrapped ties round their heads like Lost Boys, dismantling the stair gates, and sliding down the bannister on to a crash mat of pillows, cushions and coats assembled at its base.
The main event, of course, is the roll call of Secret Santa presents, which leads me to the prolix but necessary arrangement we observe to achieve this undertaking. My sister Caoimhe assembles a database in September, generating a sorting for all involved. The fruits of her number-crunching labours are then distributed in November; a WhatsApp message with two names – one grownup, and one child – for whom we must buy. (My father, incidentally, is not included in this process, and will receive one gift each from every sibling-partner unit, in the manner of pious tributes paid to a benevolent God).
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