About

Secret Santa Hat started as a personal project. Several years ago, my family started drawing names for Christmas while we were all gathered at Thanksgiving.

In 2017, after names were left out of the hat a couple of times and the draw had to start over each time, my brother suggested that I build an app to handle the name drawing. With a few days left until Thanksgiving, I built the first, basic version of the app. Creating a group, adding names, setting conflicts, and drawing were complete before Thanksgiving. In the years since, I have added many features to the app, such as text message invitations and reminders, wishlists, and design improvements.

The logo is an upside-down Santa hat because my family always put the names in a Santa hat to draw from.

Secret Santa Hat can be used for almost any occasion where names need to be paired together. The Secret Santa generator ensures every name is assigned while respecting any conflicts that are configured for each participant. If your group plays White Elephant instead, where everyone brings one gift and picks or steals in turn, the app draws the running order rather than matching people up. The same game has different names in different regions. It is a Yankee Swap in New England, a Dirty Santa across much of the South, and a Pollyanna around Philadelphia for the name-drawing kind. Outside the United States that same draw is a Kris Kringle, which is what it is called in Australia, the Philippines and New Zealand, and Kris Kindle in Ireland. Groups where everyone is buying each other a shirt can run a T-shirt exchange, which asks each person for their size and shows it to whoever drew them. There is a gift exchange generator for an exchange of any kind, and a page on running an office Secret Santa for a team.

Two free tools on the site do not need an exchange. The Secret Santa questionnaire builds a sheet of questions you can print for each person, and the gift wishlist template prints blank or fills in on screen. Neither asks for an email address and neither has anything to download.

Secret Santa Hat can also pair people up for a group project, or randomly assign almost anything to anything else, for free.

No account or email address is required. If you do have your group's email addresses, sending everyone their own link by email is free and needs no upgrade. Premium groups can send the same links by text message or WhatsApp instead, and can choose one of 13 themes, which changes the colors of the group pages, what names are drawn from, the emails and the preview shown when the group link is shared. Everyone can also add their individual wishlists, with photos, to help the gift giver with some ideas. Finally, after drawing a name, each person can choose to be notified when their drawn name updates their wishlist. For a comparison with another name-drawing site, the DrawNames alternative page sets out what this one does differently.

Secret Santa Hat installs to your home screen like an app, and the Secret Santa app page shows how on an iPhone, on Android and on a desktop. Once it is installed, the name you drew and their wishlist stay readable even with no connection, and a wishlist change made offline is saved and synced as soon as you are back online.