Secret Santa questions that actually help you buy better gifts

"What do you want for Christmas?" is the least productive question in the English language. It puts the work on the person receiving, it invites modesty, and the honest answer — "nothing, really" — is true and useless.

Better questions share one property: they ask about behavior rather than preference. What somebody already does is a fact. What they would like is an opinion they have not formed.

The five questions worth asking

1. What did you buy for yourself in the last few months?

The single best question, and almost nobody asks it. It reveals an actual interest with actual momentum, which is where good gifts live. Somebody who bought a bread tin in October has told you a great deal.

2. What do you keep meaning to replace?

This finds the gap between "broken" — which gets fixed — and "worn out", which does not. Worn-out things are where the good gifts are: the flashlight that barely works, the blunt knife, the socks with holes.

3. What do you always end up borrowing?

Borrowed things are needed and unjustified. That is the definition of a gift.

4. What did you get last year that you still use?

This one tells you the kind of thing that works for this person, not just one item. Somebody still using a gift from last December is telling you something about their whole taste.

5. Is there anything you definitely do not need more of?

The negative question, and the most underrated. It is how you find out they already own four scarves, cannot use scented anything, or have nowhere to put another mug.

The questions to stop asking

• "What are your hobbies?" Produces a list of nouns. "Reading" does not tell you which book.
• "What's your favorite color?" Useful for roughly two gift categories and misleading for the rest.
• "What's on your wish list?" Fine if a list exists. As a question it usually produces one expensive item nobody in the group can afford.
• "What size are you?" The single most common way a Secret Santa gets guessed. Do not ask it in December.

If you ask nothing else, ask question one and question five. Between them they produce a direction and a prohibition, which is most of what you need.

Asking without giving yourself away

The awkwardness of a secret exchange is that the useful questions are conspicuous. Three ways around it:

1. Ask a third party. A sibling, a partner, a colleague at the next desk. Faster and safer than asking the person.
2. Ask everybody the same thing. If the organizer sends the same three questions to the whole group, nobody learns anything from being asked.
3. Ask in November. The same question is innocuous a month out and transparent on the twentieth of December.

For organizers: the three-question form

If you run the draw, this is worth sending to everybody with the names. Three questions, no more — a long form gets half-completed.

1. Something you have bought for yourself recently.
2. Something you keep meaning to replace.
3. Something you do not need any more of.

Collect the answers, send each person only their own recipient's. It removes nearly all of the guesswork in a large family, where somebody has drawn a cousin's husband they see twice a year.

And then write the card

Two or three sentences explaining why you chose it. This is not decoration. A gift with a reason attached is evidence somebody was paying attention, and that is the part people remember long after the object has been used up.