With love from your secret santa

Christmas traditions among many families are sacred; ours are stockings upstairs and then main presents downstairs, playing guess-what-kind-of-sparkling-wine at dinner and a dessert made by me and my dad. But as well as the Christmas traditions with the Littlehales', I also have my Christmas traditions with my other family; my girls. We've all been best friends for about 8 years now but some of us actually go back over 18 years! And one of our most sacred Christmas traditions is Secret Santa. Now on its 7th year, we started off by drawing names out of a hat (tedious and surprisingly difficult for everyone to pick out someone who wasn't themself) but we've since moved onto doing it through drawnames.co.uk. And to this day, we've managed to never spill on the run-up or to ruin the surprise before the gift-giving day!

It's actually a very advanced operation, you might be surprised to know. We always do our gift exchange at my house and in previous years, we've been able to tell who got who by the handwriting on the label or by the wrapping paper or by seeing who brought which gift in. Now, we don't write tags (or if we do, we use tactics like using our non-writing hand or getting someone else to do it) and we all bring our wrapped presents in plastic bags, give them to my mum and she places them on each persons seat so that when we go into the room with 5 presents laid out, we have no idea who brought what. We then guess as we go along who got who and it's very difficult when the person you bought for is opening theirs, as you have to pretend to not know ("ooooo what is it??"). This year, I bought for Staci and got her a Gucci perfume, revolution highlighting gift set and a blanket with snack pocket on the front because she loves a chill night and always moans that her boyfriend steals her food! And I managed to correctly guess that Katie K had bought for me; she got me a gorgeous new bag (I needed, and wanted, a black night out bag but with silver hardware because all mine are gold), a pornstar martini cocktail and gin gift set. The gin gift set alone could've told me it was from Katie because it's the exact colour scheme of her flat!

Each year we tend to do something different for our Christmas celebrations and this year we decided to go for a meal at Bendigo. Their menu was actually really good value; £20 for 2 courses and a free glass of prosecco each too when you book in advance! So obviously we (and by that, I mean "I") booked in advance. Now, like I say, we've all been friends for a very long time and so I know them all very well. And the main thing I know is that all of them (with the exception of Sian) couldn't be on time to something if their life depended on it. So when I told them that the table was booked for half 7 and so to come to mine for drinks and presents at 6, I was actually expecting them round somewhere between half 6 and 7. Hence why I actually booked the table for 8, but didn't reveal that to them until the point where they were finally there, ready and thinking that we only had 5 minutes to do presents and leg it to the restaurant. So my plan worked a treat! Looks like I'll have to widen the lie even further next year, now they know my game. When we did get there though, the food was lovely. For starters, we got a load of tapas to share which included breaded brie bites, pigs in blankets, patatas bravas, chicken and chorizo and christmas hummus (I don't know which bit of the hummus made it christmassy). Although we didn't play it smart because the starters also came with a load of bread which we shouldn't really have eaten, because by the time the main courses came, we were already pretty full. Me, Staci and Katie had turkey pie, Katie had pork belly and Sian had halloumi wellington and all the mains came with the biggest pile of mash you've ever seen. We all really struggled and were fit to burst afterwards, but it was really lovely. Normally, I'd be all up for going out for more drinks afterwards but we were all fit to burst and didn't know if we could even make it somewhere else so we finished the night with a couple of G&T's at mine instead. The perfect friends Christmas! Another successful year I'd say girls.