I was like a kid on Christmas pulling all of the interesting items out of the box. My Secret Santa even put together a letter explaining each of the items:
The Bandhanwar fits perfectly across my front door and I’m saving it for the next time I have friends over. I’ve already worn the stole (it got loads of compliments!) and eaten the snacks (the soan papdi is unlike anything I’ve ever tasted - I love the texture). Next up is putting up the Madhubani painting, which is my absolute favourite part of the gift…
@kaustav The post office gave you away, so I don’t need to guess who put together this beautiful gift. Thank you so much! I really love each and every item, and appreciate all the thought and effort that went into it.
P.s. When I was organising your gift, I wanted to send something from South Africa, but it turns out sending parcels from SA to India requires a mountain of paperwork, including proof of residency from you. That’s why I ended up using Amazon. I hope you didn’t have to jump through too many hoops sending it the other way.
Yayy, I am really that glad that the gift reached you safely and that you liked it.
The soan papdi is one of my most favorite things to eat. Madhubani art form is amazing and I am always at awe at the amount of work that goes into making such intricate designs.
Kantha is something very local to our region, so much so I have grown up seeing my grandmom stich quilts with this method.
For a red-tape heavy country like India, sending international parcels is surprisingly easy. Just need to fill-up a pretty simple customs form listing the contents of the package and hand over a copy of some form of photo-ID.
I have also just received my secret santa gift! :D It had arrived a couple of weeks ago at my PO box actually, but then it took some time to get re-routed here. :)
A few of us were chatting about potentially changing up Secret Santa this year.
Right now, shipping often ends up eating a big chunk of the budget. Sometimes the shipping info also gives away who sent the gift.
Since many of us already meet up during coworking week in middle of the year, what if we brought our gifts with us and exchanged them there instead?
It would mean fewer shipping headaches, and less chance of the secret being revealed, but it might be tricky to hide the gifter’s identity! Another downside is that not all of our teammates are always able to attend the coworking week.
I’ve paid anywhere between 40-80 EUR for shipping an item that has to be under 10EUR. It does feel wasteful at times. I think exchanging it during the coworking week sounds good, and in fact I think the riginal post does mention that receiving the gift at the conference is an option, we’ve just never used it AFAIK.
I do think we should keep the postal option, since this tradition isn’t just limited to OpenCraft employees. This is a public thread, and former OpenCraft people like @guruprasad and @jill have participated, and so have people outside of OpenCraft like @sarina. So limiting it to the co-working week would make it difficult for them to participate.
I do think we can move the entire process to work around the conference so those who’d like to mail it can do so then, and those who’d like to bring it in person can bring it to the conference. We can also give people the option of sending it to someone who isn’t their secret recipient but is in the same country or has a lower shipping rate so that the person attending the conference can bring it with them.
I’m fine with either option, but I think we need to clearly pick one or the other; otherwise it’s really two different events, 6 months apart… We can always do it twice a year though.
