Secret Santa questionnaire. Ten questions and one shortcut
A Secret Santa questionnaire is the form the organizer sends round because nobody on the team has a wish list and the Santas need something to go on. The useful version is short, work-safe and answerable in two minutes. Ten questions is plenty. Coffee or tea, what always runs out on your desk, which gift card you would actually spend, what you cannot eat, and a “please do not buy me” line at the end. Below are the ten I use, why each one helps the person doing the buying, which questions to leave out at work, and a shortcut that makes most of the form unnecessary.
Why a Secret Santa questionnaire exists at all
Someone pulls a name out of the hat, and the name belongs to a person they have said hello to in the kitchen maybe twice. They have $25 and a deadline. Asking “what do you want” gets “oh, anything”, and “anything” is how people end up with a scented candle. A questionnaire is nothing more than an attempt to put a few facts in front of a Santa who has none.
The forms I found when I went looking all compete on count. Fifty questions, seventy, a hundred and fifty, two hundred and twenty. Nobody fills in two hundred questions about themselves for a mug budget, and the few who would are now handing the whole office a lot of material. Half of those lists drift into clothing sizes, relationship status and “describe your perfect date”. At work.
The first one I sent at a job had twenty-odd questions, one of them about star signs, because I had copied it from somewhere without reading it. Most people answered the first five and stopped. The Santas got five answers each, and the form was five questions long in practice anyway. So the version below is ten, and the first five carry the most weight on purpose.
The ten questions
Put the price limit at the top, then this list. Every answer should take one line.
- Coffee, tea or neither, and how do you take it?
- What always runs out on your desk?
- Which gift card would you actually spend before February?
- Sweet or salty, and is there anything you cannot or will not eat?
- Name one small thing you have bought for yourself more than once.
- What do you do with a free Sunday?
- Useful or silly?
- One color you like, and one you never want to see again.
- What was the last small gift you were genuinely glad to get?
- Finish the sentence. “Please do not buy me ___.”
Here is what each one does for the person holding your name:
| Question | Why it helps the Santa |
|---|---|
| Coffee or tea | A bag of good beans or a tin of leaf tea is a complete gift inside any budget, and the answer rules out the one they would have got wrong |
| What runs out on your desk | Pens, sticky notes, hand cream, snacks. A thing you already use up is a gift that cannot miss |
| Which gift card | “Any gift card” is a shrug. A named shop they visit weekly is a gift they will spend by January |
| Sweet or salty, allergies | Food is the fallback for every nervous Santa. This stops the fallback being a box of nuts for someone with a nut allergy |
| Bought twice | The strongest signal on the form. Nobody buys a bad thing twice |
| Free Sunday | One line about running, baking or crosswords gives the Santa a whole aisle to shop in |
| Useful or silly | Settles the one argument every Santa has with themselves in the shop |
| A color, and a never | Covers the notebook, the mug, the socks, the scarf, in one answer |
| Last glad gift | Tells the Santa what “good” looks like to this person at this price |
| Please do not buy me | Takes the worst outcome off the table. More on this below |
Questions one to five are the ones a Santa can act on with no taste and no time. Six to nine make the gift feel chosen. Ten is insurance.
The line to always include
If the form gets cut down to three questions, number ten stays. “Please do not buy me” is the only question that removes a bad gift instead of suggesting a good one, and bad gifts are what people actually remember from an office exchange.
Ask for it plainly and let people answer plainly. No candles. Nothing scented. No alcohol. No mugs, I own eleven. Nothing with a cat on it. Whatever it is, the Santa reads that line first, and it saves them from the exact item they were about to grab on the way in.
What not to ask at work
The long lists get long by adding questions that are fine between friends and strange between colleagues. Leave these out.
- Clothing and shoe sizes. Nobody should be buying a coworker clothes on $25, and the question is uncomfortable to answer on a form the organizer and a Santa will both read.
- Ring size, for the same reason, and because jewelry is a bad office gift at any price.
- Relationship status, kids, “who is your celebrity crush”, “describe your perfect date”. None of these produce a gift. They produce a chat in the kitchen that the person did not sign up for.
- Religion, or whether they celebrate Christmas. Let people opt in to the draw instead. The ones who are in have already answered.
- Home address on the shared form. Remote teams need addresses, but the organizer collects them privately and passes each one to one Santa.
- Health beyond allergies. “Anything you cannot eat” is enough. “Any medical conditions” is a form for a different department.
- Icebreakers. “Biggest fear”, “three words that describe you”, “a superpower you would pick”. Fun in a meeting, useless in a shop.
The test for any question is whether the answer leads to a thing on a shelf. If it leads to a conversation instead, it does not belong on a gift form.
How to send it and what to do with the answers
Send it before the draw, with a deadline a week out, and say how long it takes. “Ten questions, two minutes” gets answered. “Fill in the attached” does not. Collect the answers in one place, then after the draw pass each Santa the single answer sheet for the name they pulled, nothing else. People write more honestly when they know only their Santa and the organizer will see it.
And keep the questionnaire separate from the money. If the office has already been through a few collection envelopes this autumn , the Secret Santa is the one December thing that does not ask anyone to chip in twice. A two minute form is the whole cost of taking part.
The shortcut. Ask for three links instead
The questionnaire is a workaround. What a Santa actually wants is a list, and the form exists because asking for a list gets “oh, I do not need anything”. So before sending ten questions, try asking for three links. Three products, each inside the budget, one line each on why.
Three links carry more information than fifty questions. Each one has a price, a photo and a shop, and it answers the only question that matters, “would they like it”, with “they picked it”. The Santa chooses one of the three, or uses them as a reading of taste and buys something nearby. Either way nobody is guessing. I wrote up what to put in those links so the Santa relaxes, and the short version is three to five things inside the band, one safe pick, and the do-not line.
I keep mine in wishstack, the app I make. It is free on iOS, Android and web, you paste a link and the card fills itself with the title, photo and price, and the whole list goes out as one link that the Santa opens without installing anything. Drawing names inside it is coming soon, so this year the hat is still a hat.
Some of the team will not send links, no matter how nicely you ask. That is fine. The form is for them. Offer the links first, send the ten questions to whoever does not reply, and make sure every answer sheet, long or short, ends with the one line about what not to buy.