The wish lists of children vary widely among the different ages and between girls and boys.   So, in no particular order, here are the most common wishes: 

• Books
• DVDs
• Legos
• Webkinz (a popular stuffed animal with an online life)
• Pajamas
• Polly Pockets or Barbie doll
• A game called “Bop it”

If you are the Secret Santa for a child, you probably can’t go wrong with one of these gifts.  Ho! Ho! Ho!

Sinterklaas rhymes are meant to be fun and maybe just a little embarrassing.  They usually rhyme aabb, but hey, do whatever comes to you!  If you need help coming up with rhymes, use rhymezone.com.  I chose my friend to demonstrate how easy this is.  Just write down a few ideas and then think of things that rhyme with those words (or just sort of rhyme) :

Kim – win, begin, friend.
Joe -  no, snow, row, tow, grow, know
Fundraising on Scooter – shooter, polluter
Southern gal – pal, now
Nutcracker – attacker, slacker
Court – short

Now, just start writing about this person, and tease her a little bit!

Sinterklaas is in Brooklyn now,
Looking for a Southern gal.
Mom of 3 and wife to Joe,
He found Kim, who can’t say “no”.

Every day in Court she’s no slacker,
Every night watching Will in the Nutcracker.
She sets an example for every polluter,
By raising school funds on her scooter.

She baked a glorious feast
To save us from starvation,
Now she will open this gift
And start our celebration!

Before Kim opens her gift (or surprise!) she must read this poem out loud without reading it to herself first.  Then, as she scans the room curiously for her personal Secret Santa, she exclaims, “Thank you Sinterklaas!” and opens her gift.

While I am going to try to construct a “surprise” the Dutch way for my drawn person, I’m also going to need good old wrapping paper this Christmas.  I know, I could go with the gift bags, but my sister gave me a beautifully wrapped gift last year and it was really special.  So I ordered my paper from PaperMojo.com, the favorite online store of the professionals (just ask OrangeBeautiful).  These papers are beautiful and I shopped until my typing fingers dropped. 

Now I’m headed to Paperlicious.com for my Christmas cards.  I want to beat the rush, and they are another one of those favorite stores.

BTW, it’s pretty quiet at the DrawNames.com helpdesk (that’s me too).  I can see that most of our groups have already drawn their names… how’s it going?  You’re writing emails to each other, but I’m not hearing much, and I would LOVE to hear from you!

Now I’m moving my laptop to the kitchen.  I’m going to try the recipe for kruidnoten, in honor of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson arriving in our great land.  By the way, Kay was happy to let me use her image for this post.  I wanted you to experience her magic on my blog. 

Kruidnoten is a traditional Dutch Sinterklaas treat, and Kay does a great job of describing the event in her blog.  That’s KRAUT-note-en, but I’m sure I can add a few more syllables in my native southern US accent. 

Just a quick warning.  Plan on losing track of your time when you visit kayotickitchen.com.  This year I’m hoping to have a wonderful Kayotic Thanksgiving and Christmas feast, instead the usual chaotic one.  I wonder if Kay’s home is as beautiful as her culinary arts.

1. Gift cards

2. DVDs

3. Books

4. CDs

5. Hat, scarf and/or gloves (for adults) and Legos (for children)

Is this a surprise to anyone? Really, in our thousands of wish lists from around the world, the wishes for gift cards far outweigh any other wish. If you journey on over to giftcards.com you can design visa cards with your own photos.  And visa cards are accepted practically everywhere.  Very unique.

Happy shopping!

ho!  ho!  ho! 

 DrawNames.com has just made our gift exchange a lot easier for us…. 

Date: December 25, 2009
Dollar limit: $
Location: Patty so graciously offered her place

Here’s how we do this:

1. Click on the link in this email to “join” the group. This is the link that you’ll use to update your wish list, so keep this email!  You’ll get an email confirming that you joined the Group, with this link again.

2. After everyone has joined, you’ll get an email with the link to your drawn person’s wish list. Keep this email too, so you can view their wish list often!

3. If you want, you can anonymously send a question to the person whose gift you’re buying (i.e. what size? what color?). It might also be fun to use this to mess with your person (i.e. if you were going to buy yourself a cat, what kind would you get?). If they answer, you’ll get an email from DrawNames.com.

4. Open any emails from drawnames.com, because your person may be asking you anonymous questions too!

5. DrawNames.com is now a collaboration with www.Lootjestrekken.nl in the Netherlands, and there is a strong connection between Sinterklaas and Santa Claus (btw, did you know that this is our 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson arriving in yet-to-be NYC?). So please consider adding some really fun Dutch traditions. 

Sinterklaas’ Pieten are really really good at poetry, and they attach a poem to every gift. These poems follow a special rhyme scheme – AABBCCDDEEFF etc… and even have a special kind of rhyme called “Sinterklaas rhyme” best described as “It rhymes. Sort of.” (in    Sinterklaas rhyme, “rhyme” would rhyme with “fine” for instance).  These rhymes either say something about the gift without revealing too much, say something about the person that is receiving it (in a funny way), or contain some kind of task description (for children this usually is singing a song, for adults it can be anything). Or they contain a combination of the above. 

Also sometimes the packaging of the gift is especially creative: shaped to resemble something, with good old paper maché or other means. This is called a “surprise”, pronounced in the French way: surpreesuh.

Since quite a few members, friends and even family members have asked, “are you back?!!” I thought the answer should be my first blog.  For all our Draw Names newcomers, I’ll give a brief history first, and then move on to the blog title…

 In 2002, DrawNames.com hit the internet and ran successfully (but not particularly profitably) for 6 holiday seasons.  This web site was my passion.  But in 2008 I made the excruciatingly painful decision to close the site.  It needed significant upgrades and, well, it was questionable if the cost would be covered by affiliate income.

Just curious, anyone been in the same boat?  I called it rough seas.

 History repeats itself…

 In 1609 Henry Hudson arrived in yet-to-be New York City (stay with me here…) and along with all the nice Dutch folk came their nice traditions including Sinterklaas—which Americans fashioned into Santa Claus and eventually the tradition of drawing names for Secret Santa.

 400 years later, in 2009, I received an email from a Dutch development group wanting to bring an English version of their web site, www.Lootjestrekken.nl, to Americans.  Lootjestrekken translates into “draw names” and they understandably were interested in my domain name.

 Truthfully, I wasn’t ready to think about DrawNames.com at all, and I turned them down on the first two emails.  I had actually received quite a few requests for the domain name and I was beginning to think I would make more money off the sale of the domain name than I did from running the site for 6 years.  It’s a good thing I’m a perky person because that could be a very sad thought after all my hard work.

For some reason when Arjan contacted me for what he wrote would be the last time, I started a conversation.  It turns out that Lootjestrekken.nl is wildly popular in the Netherlands, and Arjan and Rob were pleasantly persistent in their intentions to make an English version of their web site.  So I just decided to go for it.

 Boy, am I glad I did!  We worked all summer and celebrated with a Skype launch party on September 29^th.  We popped corks on both sides of the Atlantic.  It was also the first time that we used web cams, so I finally met Arjan, Rob, and their incredible team of developers face to face.

 As a last note, it’s interesting to me that if it weren’t for my new launch of DrawNames.com, I never would have known that the entire Hudson Valley Region of the United States is having boat loads of activities to celebrate the 400^th Anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival.  Who knew?  Hopefully, a lot more of us now.