FM Imagines: Student Group Secret Santa

With the holidays just around the corner, winter cheer has begun to parade across campus, and yet anxiety as to what to get your Secret Santa abounds. This year, to help you brainstorm what to get your gift exchanging boo, FM imagines what members of certain student groups on campus give each other.

REPUBLICAN CLUB

For the Harvard Republican Club’s Secret Santa, not all members can get a gift—there are no free handouts here. Rather, each gift is sold on a sealed bid auction so that the goods are acquired by those who value them the most. The secrecy tradition is maintained, of course, as each seller of the gift is under a strict “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy so that their identities remain protected.

FLY CLUB

Rather than completing their exchange in person, the Fly members slip the gifts with calligraphed envelopes under their assignments’ doors. Popular gifts include (and are limited to) taxidermy, port, and salmon pants.

THE CO-OP

Because the term Secret Santa assumes that the participants identify as Christian, the Co-opers instead have titled the practice “Anonymous Solstice Symbolic Figurehead.” Gifts are often food related, such as kale candy canes and hamless holiday ham. Also popular are soap boxes in preparation for Occupy Harvard revivals.

THE ADVOCATE

The Advocate gift exchange takes place, pro forma, Advocate style—in a dark room filled with cigarette smoke. Last year, we imagine one member was especially excited when he received a year-long New Yorker subscription, exclaiming that the magazines will look great on his elm wood coffee table. Another member decided to help his Secret Santa with an early New Year’s resolution and gifted a nicotine patch. Maybe this will be his lucky year.

FOP

FOPpers exchange gifts in the place they feel most at home: in nature and stuff. They organize a weekend hike to the mountains, and around a crackling campfire they exchange horror stories, exotic varieties of fruit, and limited edition L.L. Bean woolen socks.