How to run a Secret Santa with a Halloween theme

Most groups only swap gifts once a year, in December, when everyone is already tired of shopping. A Halloween Secret Santa moves the draw six weeks earlier and gives it a theme that is easy to shop for. Fake spiders are cheaper than fairy lights, and nobody expects a serious present.

It works for an office, a group of friends or a family that likes dressing up. It does not work for a group that finds Halloween a bit much; for them, keep it to an autumn theme and leave the skulls out.

Draw names two weeks before the party

Pick the party date first. The last weekend of October or the first days of November are the obvious choice, because the shops are still full of Halloween stock and nothing has been pushed aside for Christmas yet. Then organise a Secret Santa online and draw names at least two weeks ahead, so people can order something instead of grabbing whatever is left at the supermarket on the 30th.

Set the budget with the draw. A limit of around 15 to 20 is enough for this one. Halloween gifts are meant to be a bit silly, and a budget of 40 only makes people overthink it. Say clearly what counts as on theme, too. Spooky, funny and simply autumnal are three different briefs, and if you leave it open you get one person with a skull-shaped decanter and another with a pumpkin spice candle, wondering if they read the same invitation.

Skip the group chat for the draw itself. Someone always misses the message, or replies to everyone with the name they drew. An email draw with the budget attached takes care of that.

Gifts that work on a budget of 20

Aim for charming rather than frightening, unless you know the group watches horror films together on purpose. A few things that reliably land:

• A pumpkin spice candle from Yankee Candle, in the small jar that fits the budget
• A Halloween mug with a ghost or a black cat on it, filled with hot chocolate sachets
• A pumpkin carving kit with the small serrated saws, which do the job far better than a kitchen knife
• A paperback of Stephen King's Pet Sematary or Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House
• A 500-piece Halloween jigsaw for the dark evenings that follow
• A bag of good sweets, not the supermarket mix that is left over anyway

Leave the slime kits and the plastic costume accessories on the shelf. They are cheap for a reason and go in the bin on 2 November. A tea with a silly name is fine as an extra next to the gift, not as the whole gift.

Wrapping matters more than usual

Half the fun of a Halloween exchange is the reveal, so put some effort into the outside. Kraft paper with a stamped bat, or a strip of black ribbon, costs almost nothing. Stretchy fake cobweb from the party shop works as wrapping for odd shapes, and a small gift disappears nicely inside a hollowed-out pumpkin.

Write the tag as a clue rather than a name. Two lines of bad rhyme about what is inside is plenty. Then, before anyone opens a parcel, let the receiver guess who drew them. It keeps the room watching every reveal instead of checking phones between turns.

The rest of the evening

Ask people to come in costume, and say so in the invitation, because half the group will not bother unless they know the other half is doing it. A punch labelled witches' brew and a chocolate cake with crushed biscuit on top for the graveyard dirt take twenty minutes and set the tone better than a shop-bought platter. Dim the lights, hang some cobweb, put out two carved pumpkins. That is the whole decor budget.

Keep one short activity for after the gifts, either a round of pumpkin carving with the kits or ten questions of Halloween trivia. Then stop. An evening that runs an hour past the gift exchange is a good evening; three hours of organised games kills it.

Groups that do this once tend to do it every year, so keep the list of who joined. Next October you can organise a Secret Santa again in a few minutes, add the new colleagues and draw names before the pumpkins are even in the shops.