The Reddit community revives the holiday spirit after popular Secret Santa events end

For Beth Patton, the best part of the holiday season is not the lights, or the snow, or opening presents from family members — it’s swapping gifts with random strangers on the Internet.

So, when a popular “Secret Santa” gift exchange run by the image hosting site Imgur dropped its program ahead of Christmas this year, the 26-year-old from Indiana was devastated.

“I told my family — I was like ‘Christmas is canceled.’ That was my absolute favorite part of Christmas. I look forward to it all year,” she said.

It was the latest online gift giving event of its kind to shut down, again leaving its once merry participants in search of a new space to anonymously swap presents during the holidays. Imgur’s event followed the same fate as the immensely popular RedditGifts, which Reddit ended in 2021. But the Christmas spirit is strong, and Patton and other Reddit users are keeping user-to-user gift exchanges alive.

After her go-to exchange died, Patton is now participating in GivinGifts, another program that sprung up in the wake of RedditGifts’ demise three years ago. She’s already done five gift exchanges this holiday season.

Its main holiday gift swap event works much like the Reddit-run Secret Santa: The annual tradition matches hundreds of people together anonymously from around the world, who are then each responsible for gifting a present. Gifters are given a brief bio of their giftee’s interests, their likes and dislikes, to help them come up with a present they think the recipient would like. The GivinGifts exchanges are organized on a website separate from its dedicated subreddit.

Patton’s favorite gift she’s given through the exchanges was inspired by her giftee’s fondness for antiques and beetles.

She made a stuffed beetle plushie using antique brocade fabrics. “It just was very niche and I was really excited about that,” she said.

The gift-giving is what she enjoys most about the tradition.

“Making a stranger’s Christmas is just really fun,” she said.

On the receiving end, she enjoys finding out what a stranger decides to get her based on the brief description she gives for herself.

“Your family usually gets things that they know you want or something, or that you’ve been interested in through the years, so it’s not much of a surprise,” she said. “Where — what this stranger online is going to send me is just like a complete surprise and mystery.”

The bustling workshops behind anonymous online Secret Santa events

The cofounder of the defunct RedditGifts program, which laid the blueprint for its online gift exchange successors, says he’s happy to see people keeping the project going in its various forms.

“If they’re making people happy and getting people involved, I think that’s amazing,” said Dan McComas, also known by his Reddit username kickme444, who launched RedditGifts in 2009.

But, seeing similar challenges in copycats, he just hopes they don’t follow the same fate.

The magic of Reddit’s Secret Santa event — the sheer number of participants involved — was also what led to its downfall, McComas said.

The event was a three-time Guinness World Record holder for the world’s largest gift exchange. Paul Reubens (the late actor known for her role as Pee-wee Herman) and actor Wil Wheaton were some of the earliest celebrity participants to sign up. Bill Gates also became a regular participant.

Within the first five years of the gift exchange, it grew from about 3,000 people to over a quarter-million participants in more than 200 countries, according to its creator. In comparison, one of the most popular anonymous holiday swaps on the GivinGifts site, which Patton participated in, matched about 1,800 people this year.

When Reddit, which acquired the site in 2011, shut it down 10 years later, the most vocal of the Reddit gift-giving community thought it was a Grinch move. At the time, Redditors speculated that Reddit ended it because it wasn’t making enough money from running the effort.

The company itself hasn’t said much about the decision. In its announcement at the time, Reddit said it wanted to shut down the program to focus on improving the platform’s user experience, such as investing in moderator tools and accessibility.

McComas, a former Reddit employee, mused: “It was a huge endeavor that I just can’t imagine that it fit into what Reddit was doing at that point to invest,” he said. “They knew they were gonna IPO and probably needed to clean up a lot of the projects just to be focused.”

To keep the Christmas spirit alive with these massive Secret Santa exchanges, McComas explained, is no small task.

“What we found, and what I know Imgur, their team, has found, is that to run this and to run it successfully is a lot of work, a ton of work,” he said. “It is community management, it’s customer service.”

Keeping up the fast-growing event became more involved. The team had to find a way to make sure matches were in the same country so they wouldn’t have to pay international shipping rates.

When the team ran into issues like people not getting gifts, they began a “rematching” program that ensured no one came up empty-handed.

“People are extremely emotional when they’re giving and receiving gifts. It becomes a very special thing to them and they need help. We would get thousands of emails,” McComas said. “When it’s growing exponentially every year, you know, that means that we’re still talking to just a massive amount of users.”

When it became too much for the small team, Reddit stepped in. The company made McComas, his co-founder Jessica Moreno, and eventually others, full-time employees, and threw in a server — all of which kept the program running for as long as it did, he said.

‘Part of something bigger’

Volunteer-run or cash-strapped gift exchange platforms — such as GivinGifts and how RedditGifts started — can run into scale-related issues without the backing of a company, according to McComas. Imgur, for example, dropped its popular Secret Santa gift exchange, citing privacy concerns that made it technically and legally difficult to “handle an event of this size and scope.”

“Being able to be a part of a corporation, it meant that we had legal support and technology support,” McComas said.

In a Reddit post on r/givingifts Wednesday, one grateful participant acknowledged the effort needed to keep a community-run gift exchange operation going after the “absolutely crushing” shutdown of the official Reddit Secret Santa.

“I’m in awe of the small group of people that somehow created and maintain [GivinGifts] to allow everyone to continue the gift giving experience,” wrote the user LostBoyOfNeverland. “Thanks to their tireless work, I still have the chance to feel those warm fuzzies that come from seeing a happy giftee’s gallery post or seeing the thought a stranger put into finding something for me, and I treasure that.”

For now, Patton, the 26-year-old, is happy that her idea of Christmas isn’t “canceled.”

“There’s just nothing like that in real life. Doing a Secret Santa with people you know just isn’t the same thing as this massive thing with strangers,” she said. “You feel like you’re part of something bigger — that’s part of Christmas.”