Secret Santa on paper: draw slips, name cards, and gift tags

The slips this tool prints

Seal a draw on the generator and the send list appears with a button marked Print fold-over slips. It builds one slip per person: their own name in large type, the event label beneath it, a dashed line reading fold here · you give to, and below that line the name they drew, plus any hint you typed after a vertical bar in the roster.

The mechanics are the obvious ones. Print the sheet on ordinary paper. Fold each slip along the dashed line so the lower half is face-in. Cut them apart on the outer dashed borders, then hand each person the slip with their own name showing. Nobody unfolds anyone else's, nobody is handed a phone, and there is no message to lose.

These have to be generated with the draw, because they carry the secret. A blank slip template downloaded from anywhere is a different object: somebody still has to write the pairings onto it by hand, and reads the whole draw while doing it. On screen the printable area of the generator stays empty. It fills at the moment you press the button, goes straight to the print dialog, and is emptied again when the dialog closes. One thing to plan around: the slips are built from the pairing the page holds while that tab is open, so print them in the same sitting as the draw.

What paper costs you, stated plainly

A printed slip is readable by whoever picks it up. That is not a defect; it is what paper is. It is worth saying out loud anyway, because the rest of this site is built around a link that opens on one person's device, and a sheet of slips has none of that.

Three things change the moment you press print. The sheet holds the entire draw in plain text, where a link holds exactly one assignment. The sheet exists in a place, and places have other people in them. And you were standing at the printer, so the draw passed in front of you whether you read it or not.

The worst case is a shared office printer: your sheet sits in an output tray, gets collected with somebody else's report, or emerges while a colleague is standing at the machine. The common case is smaller and far more likely — one slip left unfolded on a desk, face up, at a party where everybody walks past that desk.

So paper trades a cryptographic property for a physical one, and physical security is a room you can see. Sometimes that is the better trade: a party where everyone is present needs no links at all, no messages, and nothing still sitting in a chat thread in February. Sometimes it is much worse, and the test is easy to apply — can you stand next to the printer, and will every slip be folded before it leaves your hands?

One asymmetry worth knowing. A lost link can be re-sealed for that one person while the draw tab is open. A lost slip cannot be reissued alone; reprinting prints everybody.

Name cards and gift tags carry no secret

Now the easy half. A place card on a table, a label on a pile of presents, a tag tied to a parcel: each carries a name and nothing more, and it is the name of the person the gift is for, which the whole room learns at the party anyway.

Because they carry nothing, none of the constraints above apply. Print them weeks early. Print thirty blanks and write them by hand on the day. Print them on the shared office printer, or hand the job to whoever in the group enjoys this part. None of it touches the draw.

This site does not generate them, deliberately: a decorative tag has nothing to do with a draw, and there is no reason to bolt a clipart library onto a tool whose only job is sealing. What a tag does need is a shape — a fold-over card at true page size, so the outside and the inside are two halves of one printed sheet and meet correctly when folded. If that is what you are after, a name-card and gift-tag generator that prints at true page size turns a list of names into a sheet of them, with no double-sided printer involved — and for tent cards it rotates the upper half, so the name reads from both sides of the table once the card is folded.

One etiquette note. If the exchange is meant to stay anonymous, put only the recipient on the tag: a from line ends the game a few seconds early.

Getting the print right

Print at 100 percent. In most print dialogs the scale control sits behind a more settings section, and the default is often fit-to-page or shrink-to-fit rather than actual size. Scaling moves the fold line off the measurement it was drawn at, and a fold line two centimetres high leaves the top of the assignment showing.

Leave the margins on the browser default rather than setting them to none. Printers have an unprintable border of their own, and a zero-margin layout is the usual reason a slip arrives with its last line clipped.

Ordinary paper beats card stock for slips: thin paper folds flat and stays folded, while heavy card springs back open, which defeats the point of a fold-over. Card is also the most common cause of a jam, and many printers take it only from a rear or manual feed — check the manual and run one test sheet first. Keep the card for tags, which are meant to be stiff.

Check the preview every time, because browsers differ in where they break pages. The preview comes from the same engine that produces the sheet, so it is not an approximation of the result — it is the result.

If you print to a PDF rather than to paper, remember what that file is: the entire draw, in plain text, on a disk. Treat it as you would the printed sheet, and delete it once the slips are cut.

Paper or links

Nothing stops you doing both, and for a split group that is usually the answer: slips for the people who will be in the room, sealed links for those who will not. Same draw, same draw ID.

The combination to avoid is printing slips for people who will not be in the room. A slip that has to travel is a slip somebody else carries.