eclectic_boy

Last year's Make an Entire Movie in 24 Hours contest winner was a mystery about a Secret Santa gift. By some coincidence, I've got one of those myself.

I was in two Holiday Secret Santas last month, one for folks on the SWIL chit-chat list, the other for folks on the Swat90 list. If you're not familiar with this holiday pastime, everyone who signs up is given the name of someone else in the group, and anonymously sends them a surprise gift (smallish, in the $10-$20 range).

Around December 20th I got my first gift. It was a "paint it yourself spinning bike bell", a fine and silly gift. I had a pretty strong suspicion that it was sent by MyS, both because it was sent from near Norristown (where her husband works) and because the neat black printing on the label looked like the pen and somewhat like the style she uses to address envelopes (all that time as co-editor of SWAPA pays odd dividends!) That, I thought, took care of my Swat90 Santa, with the Chat Santa still unknown.

So I brought up my suspicions, and she emailed back saying that first of all I was wrong, Don works in Pottstown, not that near at all, and she never uses that pen when she wants to hide her identity. She then gave the in-retrospect-obvious suggestion that bike-lovin', Norristown-dwellin'

tirerim was the culprit. So in fact I had received my Chat gift, and was still awaiting my Swat90 Santa.

Then around the 29th, I got a package with my other gift, sent from someplace (Wisconsin, maybe?) that gave me no clue who'd sent it. It was a fluorescent orange keychain-flash-drive, a thumbsize 32Meg USB drive. At first I wasn't sure if I was ever going to have a use for it... but that misapprehension lasted all of 24 hours, until

kid_prufrock brought over his laptop in hopes of printing out a paper and promptly was unable to find a driver for my printer and to get the file over to my Mac.

A few days later, the identities of everyone's Santas were revealed, and I learned that 1) My Swat90 Santa was in fact MyS and she was a cunning misdirector, and 2) My Chat Santa was

carpenter. An eminently logical person to be the sender of a nifty tech-gift like that. Seemed to be a little outside the price range, but I wasn't going to demand she take it back :^)

And then...

On January 9th I got an envelope return-addressed "Delinquent S. Santa", containing no-pop bubblestuff (the kind that comes in a plastic test-tube, and whose bubbles can last for hours). Wait, was I actually in three Secret Santas?? And if so, who should I have sent a present to as part of it??

I still don't know the answer, though despite the return address clearly telling me it was part of a Secret Santa, I'm not sure it was, at least neither of the ones I mentioned, because that was only a $3-$4 gift. If its sender is out there, drop me another hint, please!