Guide · Wish lists

Secret Santa questionnaire: a printable 12-question sheet

Here are twelve questions you can print from this page. The answers are safe to hand round and still useful to a giver who barely knows you. Wish-list tools often collect more about each person than the pairing ever could; this sheet does the same job on paper, with nothing stored online.

Questions12 Accounts required0 Answers we receivenone

Print this page from your browser. There is no form on it, no file to download, and nothing to submit.

What wish-list tools collect

People usually ask whether the organizer of a gift exchange can see who drew whom. That is a fair question, but most of the personal information in a Secret Santa ends up in the wish lists.

The wish-list step is usually handled by making everyone register. Each participant creates an account, confirms an email address, and types in their hobbies, their sizes, the food they cannot eat and, for a remote team, a postal address. All of it is tied to a real name and sits on somebody's server. In most of these tools the organizer can read it from a dashboard, because the organizer is the one chasing whoever has not filled it in.

Compare the two. A pairing is a single fact about who gives to whom, interesting for about three weeks and forgotten by January. A profile describes a person: what they eat, what they wear, what size they are, where they live. It outlives the draw, and nobody typing it in thinks of it as a privacy decision; it feels like filling in a form.

Questions a near-stranger can answer

Most questionnaires you can download ask some version of what are your hobbies? That works for a close friend and fails for the person two desks over, which is the exact case an office draw is built around: a group who see each other daily and know each other slightly. An open question put to a near-stranger produces either a blank or a paragraph nobody can shop from.

So every question below follows one rule: the answer is either visible from the outside or so low in stakes that giving it away costs nothing. Hot drink, desk plant, a color you never wear: a colleague could have worked most of these out by looking. That rule does three things: the sheet takes two minutes to fill in, where an open questionnaire takes fifteen; a copy left face-up on the printer gives nothing away; and a giver who gets no sheet back can still notice the same answers.

The twelve questions

Copy them onto a sheet, or print this page and write in the margins. The note after each question says why it is on the sheet; leave the notes off when you copy the questions out.

Hot drink of choice, or none. Visible on your desk at ten paces, and it points straight at the most reliable gift category an office has.
Sweet or savoury? One word that halves the edible aisle, and nobody has ever been embarrassed by the answer.
One category to skip entirely. The most useful line on the sheet. Candles, mugs, alcohol, anything scented: it stops a bad gift without asking you to explain why.
Should your gift avoid food and drink altogether? Yes / No. It asks what to avoid and leaves out why. A near-stranger buying for you does not need a diagnosis in order to shop correctly.
Desk plant, or no desk plant? Sorts a whole shelf of the gift shop, and a giver can check the answer by walking past.
A color you would never wear. Far easier to answer than a favorite, and more useful, because it rules options out.
Something you have mentioned wanting in the last month. The highest hit rate on the sheet. It does not have to be affordable; the shape of it is the part a giver can use.
Something to keep, or something that gets used up? This is the split that decides whether a wrong guess lives in a drawer for three years or is gone by January.
Anything sized, such as clothes, gloves or a hat? Yes / No, and nothing more. A yes tells your giver to ask you directly or choose something else. A sheet that passes through several hands is the wrong place for the number.
Practical or silly? Sets the tone, and tells a giver whether a novelty desk toy will land or die on the spot.
Something you already own several of. Heads off the duplicate, which is the classic near-miss from someone who knows a little about you but not much.
If they are stuck, which shop should they walk into? Turns an impossible brief into a place: a stationery shop, a hardware shop, a bookshop, a bakery.

Printing it, and getting the answers back

Print straight from the browser, with Ctrl+P on Windows or Cmd+P on a Mac. The questions are the page, so there is no template to open and no download. This site has no field to type an answer into, so nothing on the sheet is transmitted by this site.

Collecting the answers is where questionnaires usually end up in a spreadsheet. There are two ways round it. The first is paper: everyone folds their sheet once and hands it to the organizer, who keeps the pile and reads a line out to any giver who asks. The second is the group chat, where each person posts their own answers under their own name.

The group chat is safe because only the pairing is secret. A wish list the whole group can read gives away nothing about who is buying for whom, and it takes the organizer out of the middle of a dozen small errands.

The one-line hint field, and who reads it

The generator has a compact version of this built in. On the roster you write a name, a vertical bar, and one short line: Priya Rao | black coffee, no candles. Whoever draws Priya sees that line inside their own sealed link, beside her name. You can see it as well, because you typed it, and so can a delegate if you hand the draw on, because the roster link carries the hints too.

The organizer typed those hints, so the organizer can read them. With no server collecting them separately, there is no way around that.

The hint field puts the answer in front of exactly the person who needs it, at the moment they open their link, with no second app and no account. It is not a private channel, so use one test when you write a hint: if a line would embarrass the person it describes, it is the wrong hint. Likes strong coffee is a hint. Anything you would not read out in the room belongs somewhere else, or nowhere.

What a questionnaire cannot fix

It cannot make a bad budget work. The usual complaint after a gift exchange is a cap set at a number where nothing good exists in the category everybody landed on, so twelve people each bought a slightly disappointing version of the same idea. Twelve perfect answers do not repair that. Setting the cap where a real thing can be bought does, and you make that decision in the announcement, before anyone fills in a sheet.

It has two smaller limits. It prevents the actively wrong gift, but the memorable ones still come from somebody who was paying attention all year. And a half-filled sheet is normal. A blank usually means the person does not mind, which is itself an answer a giver can act on.

Frequently asked questions

Do people actually fill in a Secret Santa questionnaire?

Yes, if the sheet is short and nothing on it could embarrass anyone: length and stakes decide how many come back, more than enthusiasm does. Twelve one-word answers like these come back from most of a group inside a day. A form that asks for hobbies, sizes and a postal address does not, and the people who skip it tend to be the ones their giver knows least well, which is exactly the wrong half to lose. Eight sheets back out of twelve is a good result: the four missing ones cost their givers a guess, which is where everybody started anyway.

Can I just collect everyone's answers in a shared spreadsheet?

Yes, but it is the most common way a gift exchange leaves a permanent record. A spreadsheet ties every answer to a real name, takes whatever sharing setting the drive gave it, and is still sitting there in March when the biscuits are long gone. Paper in a drawer does the same job for six weeks and then goes in the recycling. If it has to be digital, ask people to post their own answers in the group chat under their own name. Nobody needs to keep a wish list secret, so posting the answers to the group costs nothing.

How does my giver see my answers if the draw is anonymous?

In one of two ways, and neither touches the pairing. The first is the group chat, where everyone can read everyone else's answers and only your giver knows which set matters to them. The second is the hint field in the generator: the organizer writes a name, a vertical bar, and one short line, and whoever draws that person sees the line inside their own sealed link. The organizer typed those hints, so the organizer can read them. That is acceptable because a hint describes a wish and says nothing about who drew whom.

Should the sheet ask about allergies or clothing sizes?

No, only about what they mean for the gift. A yes or no to whether your gift should avoid food and drink tells a giver everything they need in order to shop correctly and nothing about your health. Sizes work the same way: a yes to anything sized is a signal to ask you directly or pick something else, and a sheet that passes through several hands is the wrong place for the number. The registration-based tools that collect all of it end up holding a description of a person that outlasts the party.

Does this site keep anything from the questionnaire?

No. This page has no form, no field and no account, so the sheet is text you print and fill in with a pen. The generator itself runs the whole draw inside your browser, and nothing you type there is transmitted by this site, which you can check by switching your wifi off and running a draw anyway. What does travel is a link, once you send it, and the chat app or mail provider you send it through holds that message the same way it holds every other message you send.