The Christmas truce of 1914
Soldiers climbed out of their trenches to exchange cigarettes, songs and a few kickabouts.
Real Secret Santa stories
Reported accounts of gift exchanges, anonymous giving and the rooms people fill at Christmas. Sources are linked; no invented reader quotes.
Add everyone's photo. We guess the gifts.
Upload a photo + a few interests for each person → we draw names and hand every Santa gift picks they're more likely to love.
Start with photos →Most gift-exchange advice is written from the organizer's side: how to draw names, set a budget, keep couples apart. These four pieces start somewhere else — with people who actually gathered, gave something away, or climbed out of a trench to meet the other side.
They are not testimonials. Each piece is reported from a public archive, newspaper or museum collection, and every source is linked at the bottom. We don't invent reader stories, and we don't publish quotes we can't source.
Four accounts
Larry Stewart's $1.3 million Secret Santa
A Kansas City businessman gave away cash anonymously for 26 years.
A 1950s family Christmas
Three photographs of the Mosbacher family, and the pause before the first gift.
The 1922 office Christmas party
A Minneapolis greeting-card company, a hall, and a very large tree.
The four pieces are not a history of the holiday. They are four answers to the same question: what turns a gift exchange into a story people retell for years. A truce, a stranger with $100 bills, a family in a living room, a company in a hall. None of them needed an app. All of them needed someone to decide that the room was worth gathering.
Why these stories
A Secret Santa is a small piece of social design: you ask people to give something to someone they barely know, and you hope the room feels better afterward. The same questions show up in a trench in 1914, a Kansas City parking lot in 1979, a living room in the 1950s and a company hall in 1922. Who is included? What is the gift? Who gets to see?
If you are organizing an exchange, the rules page turns these lessons into a checklist. If you are choosing a tool, the comparison page explains what is included at no cost and what the unlock adds.
How we report
We use public-domain photographs and public sources. Where a photograph is illustrative rather than of the person in the story, the caption says so. If you spot an error, email hello@secretsantaname.com.
Add everyone's photo. We guess the gifts.
Upload a photo + a few interests for each person → we draw names and hand every Santa gift picks they're more likely to love.
Start with photos →Keep planning
Questions
Can I submit a story?
We only publish stories we can verify. If you have a documented story, email hello@secretsantaname.com with links or records.
Add everyone's photo. We guess the gifts.
📸 Add photos → get gift picksUpload a photo + a few interests for each person → we draw names and hand every Santa gift picks they're more likely to love.
Start with photos →Updated October 28, 2026