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).
This is, we are told, entirely random, although the frequency with which my little brother Conall and I have ended up exchanging socks and comic books over the years – being siblings whom everyone else decries as difficult to buy for – may raise concerns about the sanctity of said process, and the integrity of our family as a whole.
Children are exempt from having to buy anything for anyone, in yet another example of the woke coddling that will hinder these feckless tykes from ever being useful members of society. And, yes, before you ask, additional side presents are allowed, providing they are discreetly exchanged, and neither get in the way of, nor replicate, any other gifts afforded on the day.
Last year, it was up to me to pick the presents from the teetering tower of gifts that had taken over an entire wing of Mairead’s house. This sequence, too, is highly codified; child, adult, child, adult, until you have read out all 39 names and the entire house looks like it’s been strafed by an intercontinental wrapping-paper missile.
It was only once finished, that I realised I’d not found a present for myself. This was a mystery easily solved, however, when I turned to my brother Conall with an instinctive reflex. ‘I meant to tell you that comic didn’t arrive just yet,’ he told me, genuinely pained at his oversight, ‘and thanks again for these socks.’
