London Bloggers Secret Santa

December 9th, 2009

Update 2: Signup is now closed and everybody has been emailed the person they have to get a present for.

Update: I’ve opened it up now to the whole of UK. And changed the deadline of signup to tomorrow.

A while back I blogged about participating in two Secret Santa’s for the book blogging community, and since then I’ve had the idea that it would be great to do something similar for the London bloggers. I’m not sure how many people will be interested in participating, but I thought I should at least try to set something up; I think it could be so much fun!

Christmas

So here’s the plan (for those of you who don’t know what Secret Santa is): all of the participants will be randomly assigned another blogger to send a gift to, and these assignments are kept secret until the gift has been delivered. So no one knows who their gift is coming from! The idea is to get inspired by your assigned person’s blog/twitter/whatever presence that person has online and get them a suitable gift.

Here are the “rules”:

1. Sign up and fill in all your details in this form (signup is now closed) before Friday 11th 18:00 Saturday 12th 20:00. Only sign up if you really plan to do this; I’d hate someone not ending up with a gift.

2. You should be a London UK blogger or at least an avid Twitterer. There should be enough “info” about you online for your secret santa to get you a present.

3. Gifts should be kept under £15 including shipping costs.

4. You’ll get an email sometime during the weekend (before Monday 14th) with the details of your assigned blogger.

5. Make sure your gift(s) are sent out before Christmas. They don’t necessarily have to arrive before Christmas, just sometime during the Christmas holidays (before 1st January).

6. Blog about the cool gifts you receive! Email me (melinda@missgeeky.com) a link to your blog post, so I can make a nice overview of what everybody has gotten. Also if you haven’t received anything by the 1st of January, email me and I’ll try to sort something out.

7. After your person has received and blogged about their presents, feel free to reveal your identity. You don’t have to, if you don’t want to, but it would make it so much more fun if you get to connect with this person!

8. If you have any questions, email me at melinda@missgeeky.com.

That’s it! Feel free to blog, Tweet, spread the word about this; it would be great to have as many people as possible participating.

I’ll also be joining in on the fun of this. We’ve got a piece of software that should sort out the assignments automatically and send everybody the right emails. Plus I’ve got a Christmas Elf on hand to help out with the background details and check if everything runs smoothly; I won’t see who’s paired up with who or who has gotten me. I won’t actually be in London during Christmas (from the 22nd till the 5th), but I will be online and reachable via email to answer any questions.

Have fun!