Secret Santa Drawer
Draw Secret Santa names, keep couples apart, and never share an email address.
Loading the drawer…
About the Secret Santa Drawer converter
Every other Secret Santa site asks for everyone’s email address, because it runs the draw on a server and has to post the results out.
This one runs the draw on your own device. Nobody registers, nobody hands over an address, and the organiser does not have to see who got whom.
Two ways to hand out the results
Pass the device round and let each person tap their own name: the match fills the screen, then hides again on the way to the next person. Names already seen are ticked off so nobody gets missed.
Or download a PDF of fold-over slips — name at the top, match below a dashed fold line, four to a page with a cut line between them. Print, guillotine, fold, hand out. The organiser can run the whole thing without ever reading a slip.
Couples, housemates and other exclusions
Naming a pair stops them drawing each other in both directions, which is usually the point of naming them at all.
The awkward part is that exclusions can quietly make a draw impossible, and the naive approach — shuffle the list and try again until it works — either spins for a long time or gives up on a draw that was perfectly possible. With four people in two couples, only two of the twenty-four arrangements are valid.
So this solves it properly as a matching problem instead. It finds an arrangement whenever one exists, and when none does it says so before you press the button rather than after — including the case that catches people out every year: three people where two of them are a couple can never work, because both of them can only buy for the third.
Nothing is stored anywhere but here
The list stays in your own browser between visits, on your device. There is no account, no database and no email step, so there is nothing to leak and nothing to delete afterwards.
It also means the page keeps working with the network off, which is handy when you are doing the draw in a pub with bad signal.
Frequently asked questions
Does the organiser see who got whom?
Not unless they choose to. Pass-the-phone mode only ever shows one person’s match at a time, and the printed slips are folded. The full list of pairings is only produced if you paste names into the text version of the tool instead.
Can I run it again if someone drops out?
Yes, but it starts over. A second draw produces a different result, so anyone who already looked would be holding the wrong name — removing a person clears the draw rather than quietly patching it.
Why can’t I use three people with a couple?
Because both halves of the couple can only buy for the third person, and only one of them can have them. Add a fourth person and it works.
Is the draw actually random?
It uses your browser’s cryptographic random source, and the search order is shuffled with Fisher–Yates. It is not uniform across every valid arrangement the way the spin wheel is uniform across items — with exclusions in play that would be considerably harder — but it is unpredictable and it never favours a fixed pattern.
Do I need to send anyone an email?
No. That is the main difference from most Secret Santa sites. You hand out slips, or pass a phone around.