Fear not, frail millennials – I’ve solved the Secret Santa dilemma
The polar ice cap is melting, the Amazon rainforest is being cleared at the rate of a football-pitch-sized chunk each minute, you worry that a Mexican drug cartel was behind the smashed avocado on your sourdough breakfast toast, and you’re triggered by the sound of one hand clapping. It isn’t easy being a millennial – and now a new source of angst is approaching.
The looming festive season brings with it a freight of social obligation every bit as burdensome as the chain of cash boxes and ledgers that encumbered Marley’s ghost during his yuletide visit to Scrooge. While their elders are having the annual wrangle about who goes to whom for the day, millennials, according to a recent survey, are hyperventilating about the office Secret Santa, lest their workmates think them stingy.
You’d have thought the word “secret” might offer some reassurance on that front – the point being that the recipients in this grim exercise in obligatory corporate jollity don’t know the identity of their benefactors. But Dr Ashley Weinberg, a psychology lecturer at the University of Salford, suggests that the ubiquitous judgments of social media have rendered millennials particularly sensitive to criticism, and recommends mitigating the stressful effects of Secret Santa by “giving guidelines” to lower expectations. Always good to have a professional opinion on these matters.
Handily enough, I keep a millennial indoors, so I decided to conduct my own survey. Is there a Secret Santa at his workplace? Yup. Is it causing him anxiety? Nope. Is there a spending limit? Yep, a fiver. Crikey, I say. But what on earth can you get for five quid? Plenty, says the millennial: the Co-op at the end of the road has an entire Secret
Santa section of presents for under £5, including a magnificently kitsch tin of shortbread embellished with a snowbound landscape featuring a red deer, a fox and a robin, which would be the pride of any hipster kitchen.
In fact, it seems to me that the real problem with Secret Santa, from a millennial point of view, is not so much being exposed as the office cheapskate as the high probability that almost every object featured on the innumerable websites offering Secret Santa gifts will end up in landfill. John Lewis, to take just one example, offers a plethora of stuff, including a Mensa Genius Test, a “WTF Am I Doing?” notepad and a set of six scented mini gel pens. For most of this pointless rubbish, the average timelapse between unwrapping and hurling into the waste bin is likely to be measured in seconds.
So for any anxious millennials out there, here is my instant guide to a stressfree and sustainable Secret Santa: give a book. Not a joke book, or a loo book, or one of those faux-ladybird books about Brexit, but a proper book by a real author (not a celebrity).
Horatio Clare’s winter journal, The Light in the Dark, fits the bill perfectly. It is a memoir of chilly beauty: frosty landscapes, long nights and short days, robust celebrations and fragile mental health. It has a ravishingly wintry cover of leafless trees silhouetted against a night sky, spangled with silver stars. It costs less than a tenner. And if your recipient doesn’t like it, the wretched ingrate can recycle it at one of the book exchanges to be found at all good railway stations and occasional repurposed red telephone boxes. You’re welcome.
Read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion