December hits, and offices transform overnight. It’s like walking into a Christmas movie. But the real shift? People become detectives, trying to figure out who their Secret Santa is. Everyone is buzzing with one question: who is going to surprise me?
However, these celebrations don’t arrive in uniform boxes. At Thyssenkrupp, the ritual of Secret Santa is a full-scale operation with a tech backbone. The company’s custom-built app handles the logistics: random pairings that shuffle yearly, gift categories ranging from socks to stationery, and a strict ₹500 ceiling. Amar Sonsale, the chief manager of Thyssenkrupp, once handed his Secret Santa recipient a personal copy of his favourite book. The favour returned? A pair of Jockey socks, which Amar still counts as his most memorable gift. “The entire week creates massive excitement,” he explains. “Religion, community, hierarchy don’t matter then; only the festival matters.”
The approach is far more intimate at companies like EMotorad. Christmas doesn’t just arrive on December 25; but it tiptoes in a week earlier. It’s a carefully orchestrated social experiment. The rules are simple: a ₹500 budget ceiling, and a seven-day window to make someone’s ordinary workday extraordinary. A chocolate bar left on a desk. A handwritten note tucked into a drawer. Even something as mundane as a bottle of water becomes tender when given with affection.
“We deliberately pair people who don’t know each other” explains Rosemary Amolik, the HR of EMotorad, describing what might be corporate India’s most challenging team-building exercise. For Rosemary, her first Secret Santa gave lip gloss, chocolate, and most memorably — a beautiful artificial rose. “Because of my name,” she recalls, with the warmth still evident. It’s these moments, Rosemary says, where EMotorad’s stated values of openness and transparency stop being corporate jargon and start feeling like a lived culture. While others implement simple red-and-white dress codes to set the mood, EMotorad amplifies the fun with an Ugly Sweater Day competition, dissolving the hierarchy and allowing them to be ridiculous together.
The measure of success? Not engagement metrics or attendance sheets, but something far more indefinable: the hum of curiosity that fills the office for seven days, and the happiness that lingers long after the decorations come down. For Yogesh, HTL Aircon’s sales and estimation manager, the magic of Secret Santa lies not in the surprise, but in the thought behind it. A leather bag, a gift that still sits with him. “I travel a lot to different sites,” he explains, and someone, somewhere in that office, had been paying attention. “Completely unexpected,” he says, still marvelling at how well his mystery Santa knew him.
The celebration is philosophical for Vrishali, a business development manager at HTL Aircon, who distils the entire spirit of these celebrations into a simple, three-part mantra: “Working together, laughing together, growing together”, reframing the lens of success to build camaraderie between deadlines and fostering fraternity.
From the high-tech, German-developed app to the chaos of the Ugly Sweater Day, it proves one thing: Secret Santa in Pune is a unique and heartwarming hybrid. In a city of tech giants and rapid growth, Secret Santa proves the greatest gift is not found in the e-commerce cart, but in the effort to see and acknowledge the person at the next desk.
