How to write a funny Sinterklaas poem for your Secret Santa gift

You drew a colleague's name in the office Secret Santa, the gift is sorted, and then someone mentions that in the Netherlands every Sinterklaas present comes with a poem. Now you have to write eight rhyming lines about a person you mostly know from the coffee machine. The bar is lower than you think. A wobbly rhyme read aloud on 5 December gets a bigger laugh than a polished one.

How the tradition works

The poem is written as if Sinterklaas wrote it himself. He has been watching the recipient all year, he has noticed a few things, and he has something to say about them before handing over the present. Lines rhyme in pairs (AABB), the words stay simple, and the recipient reads the poem out loud in front of everyone before the paper comes off. A joke about someone's lunch order is funnier when they have to read it themselves.

In the Netherlands most families and offices do this on pakjesavond, the evening of 5 December. In Belgium the gifts arrive on the morning of the 6th and Sinterklaas is mostly a children's feast, so the poem is rarer there, but nobody has ever complained about getting one.

Finding material to work with

Before rhyming anything, spend five minutes on the person. What do they do every single day that everyone has noticed? The colleague who is on a "quick call" for forty minutes, the one whose desk plant has died three times this year, the one who orders an oat flat white with exactly one pump of syrup. A few places to look:

• Habits at work: meetings, lunch, the state of their desk
• A hobby they will not stop talking about (padel, sourdough, a football club that keeps losing)
• A holiday that went wrong in a way they can laugh about
• Their relationship with technology, from the 400 unread emails to the phone that is always at 2 percent
• Cooking disasters and strong food opinions

Pick two or three of those, not all of them. Every line has to pass one test: you could say it to their face with a grin. If you could not, it goes.

Structuring the poem

Open as Sinterklaas and say that he has been watching: "Dear Tom, the Sint has kept an eye on you this year..." Then two or three couplets, each about one observation. Close with the gift and why the Sint chose it. Eight to twelve lines is plenty; a poem that runs onto a second page loses the room.

Keep the lines roughly the same length so the rhythm holds, and read every couplet aloud while writing. If you trip over a line, the reader will too, so rework it. Rhymes on names are allowed to be terrible. "Sarah" rhyming with "an era" gets a groan, and a groan counts as a laugh here.

Where the humour belongs

The best poems find the joke in small, everyday things. The three mugs on the desk, the mysterious "five more minutes" before every departure, the sandwich that has been the same for six years. If you share the quirk, say so in the poem; a Sint who admits he also eats crisps at his desk is more likeable.

Leave out looks, weight, relationships, money and anything the person is genuinely struggling with. A divorce, a redundancy or a health scare is not material, however well you think you know them. An inside joke the whole group gets, or a reference to something that happened in the office this year, sharpens the poem, as long as the person being teased laughs loudest.

Tying the poem to the gift

The final couplet reveals why Sinterklaas picked this present, so the joke and the gift arrive together. A poem about a coffee habit ends on a bag of good beans or a proper mug; a poem about the dead desk plant ends on a cactus. Write the last two lines first if it helps, and build the rest towards them.

This only works if you know what you are giving before you start writing. When everyone in the group agrees to create a wishlist before the draw, you pick the present from their list and write the verses to fit both the thing and the person. Guessing the gift and then writing a poem around the guess is how you end up with four lines about socks.

The draw itself takes five minutes. Organise a Secret Santa with a budget, everyone gets their name by email, and the poem does the rest on the evening. The present is forgotten by February. The poem gets read out again at the next party.