Dirty Santa

This form of Secret Santa is ideal for clearing out your apartment, basement or garage. The point of Dirty Santa Santa is to give gifts which, as the name suggests, you wouldn’t want to keep. However you don’t give the kind of trash that you might find at the scrap heap or garbage dump: there are some standards and people give gifts that they have either received themselves or perhaps inherited and that either look dreadful or that are just extremely tasteless.
The rules of Dirty Santa require that nothing is bought specifically for the event. Nonetheless committed Dirty Secret Santas spend the entire year looking through garage sales or online to find tasteless gifts that will make the biggest impression at a Dirty Secret Santa event.

Whether the event is known as Nasty Secret Santa, Tacky Secret Santa, Trashy Secret Santa or Dirty Secret Santa, the rules are always the same.
Dirty Santa can be even more fun if there is a designated theme for the event. Setting a theme requires a lot of creativity, for instance finding a way to justify calling a musical rubber fish an “antique.”
At a Trashy Secret Santa event, giftwrap makes all the difference. Especially when playing the odds, so that gifts are exchanged, “robbed” and then exchanged again, tempting packaging can have a big influence on the way people behave.
Even so, just a regular Dirty Santa event allows gifts to be personalized. For instance, carefully selecting gifts for the recipient or including a suitable message with the gift can often mean lots of laughter at the right occasion. Nevertheless, be careful not to be insulting in your choices! There can often be a thin line separating a funny message and an insulting one, so it makes sense to be careful what you write or say, and even more so where work colleagues are concerned.