Secret Santa Stocking Stuffers

Hey, it’s Cindy again, and I’m here to wrap up our talk about holiday traditions. I think we’ve already established that I like Christmas...a lot. I love giving gifts, something I got from my Dad, who was always giving surprise gifts to my mom. I think he really loved the part of Santa --  those secret gifts stuffed into stockings and piled up under the tree to be discovered on Christmas morning. It’s one of the reasons he was still leaving things for my sister and me long after we were grown and had children of our own. 

One of the things I loved was that there was usually a Santa gift for my mom, too. It wasn’t necessarily something big, just a token of his affection stuffed in her stocking or stacked neatly where she’d be sure to find it. I carried on that tradition with my own family, filling their stockings every year, even after the kids were grown and there was no reason to be secretive about any of it. But one thing always bothered me -- I loved the giving, but I missed being surprised. 

A few years ago, at a board meeting with my Aggie Moms group (that’s a whole podcast of its own!), the president asked us to share a fun Christmas tradition. So as we went around the table, one of the other moms told us how her family had an unusual gift-giving routine. Someone in the family would pick a store and everyone in the family had to buy a gift from that store. The store changed every year, and sometimes it could be a real challenge because it might be a unique specialty store, or even a gas station!

This sounded like great fun, and wound up being the perfect solution to my stocking surprise dilemma. I told my family about my idea, and we all agreed to give it a try. For that first year, we agreed to Dollar Tree as our store, and the challenge was for everyone in the family to buy one gift for each person in the family (we didn’t have any kids then). There was no price limit because...well, it was Dollar Tree. On Christmas Eve, we all stuffed each other’s stockings before we went to bed, and then we sat around the breakfast table the next morning, exploring what we got. We had a lot of great laughs and wound up with some fun little goodies that we might never have bought for each other or ourselves. After that, it was a tradition.

Over the years, we’ve shopped at Always 99¢, Daiso, Five Below, Dollar Tree (again), and others. Sometimes it’s easy to find gifts, and sometimes it’s a real challenge, but it’s always fun, and everyone looks forward to both giving and receiving the fun little trinkets we find. Notably, it never fails that someone buys me something with a llama on it, and I always find something for one of the girls that has a mermaid. Now if only I can remember what store we picked for this year….