Try doing secret Santa when 39 family members gather in one house | Séamas O'Reilly

Giving and receiving presents is all very nice, but when you’re dealing with big numbers, you need to have a system

My family obeys a fairly strict Secret Santa protocol, rendered necessarily complex by said family’s sheer scale.

By the time you read this, we will already have had our annual O’Reilly Christmas meet-up, in which my entire family descend on one house, en-masse. My wife and I have always escaped this duty because our home, though spacious enough for the four of us, would collapse into the centre of the Earth if my 10 siblings, my cousin Caraiosa, our partners, and our combined 19 kids, came calling.

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