When Secret Santa goes disastrously wrong: ‘It was the most awful thing – I just wanted to cry’

A game of solitaire accompanied by a nasty note, dog food for someone who just lost a puppy … Secret Santa is supposed to be fun, but when it’s not, it can lead to all kinds of trouble

Susanna Beves was a young teacher working at an international school in Germany when she opened a gift that would put her off Secret Santas for ever. The present itself, a solitaire game, “would have been quite nice in the normal circumstances,” she says. But it was accompanied by a note: “It told me that it had been chosen for me because I was single and lonely and likely to remain so, as I had no friends.”

“It was the most awful thing,” Beves, now 57, remembers. When she opened the gift, in a room full of 60 staff members, “I just wanted to cry,” she says. “Everybody was there and everybody was opening their gifts. So I knew that the person who’d written that note was in the room with me.”