Imagine growing up in a family where there’s a traditional secret Santa gift exchange that comes with a lot of rules. The rules have been working for years, but this year, that’s all about to change.

Would you still participate in the secret Santa?

In this story, one teenager is in this exact situation, and she’s thinking about asking not to be part of the secret Santa gift exchange this year.

Keep reading to find out why.

WIBTA if I drop out of the family secret santa?

My family has always been one for random traditions during the holidays. One of these traditions is a massive secret santa between all of the cousins.

It sounds normal but there is a list of rules that affects everyone involved.

There are a lot of rules.

These are the rules:

• Only the older cousins can do it due to the age gap in our family. If you are considered a “younger cousin” you have to wait until you are in high school to be able to be added to the pull.
• Once you are a part of the pull you do not receive any gifts from the other aunt and uncles
• The gift limit is $100 (this rule was set whenever the older cousin’s parents were paying for everything)
• The only way to get out of the pull is to either be married or have kids.
• Instead of filling out a regular secret santa survey sheet you just put whatever you want in the group text

The rules worked for everyone until this year.

Pretty weird rules but everyone understood and listened to them until this year.

So, as I mentioned before there is a pretty big age gap between the cousins. There are the older cousins (mid to late 20s) and the younger cousins (teenagers and the great grand kids).

Well this past summer one of these older cousins, Sara, got married which means that she graduates these secret santa rules and moves onto the parents’ new white elephant tradition we started last year.

The older cousins want to change the rules.

Sara was one of the core seven cousins who started the secret santa tradition and now that she gets to leave, all of the older cousins want to leave and join the white elephant.

This started a month long texting war in the cousin group chat with the older cousins fighting with the younger cousins.

At the end of the texting war, the older cousins convinced the adults to throw the rule book away and let all of them to join the white elephant. This means that the pull for secret santa went from 11 down to 4.

She wanted to make secret Santa more fun and less predictable.

I don’t know about you but personally I don’t see a point of having a secret santa at this point. Especially whenever there is a 25% chance of knowing who has you, 50% chance it’s your sibling, and 100% chance of knowing what you’re getting anyway.

So since I realized that the whole rule book is nonexistent now, I proposed a few ideas to bring the fun back.

Ideas such as bringing back the secret santa survey or requesting a variety of things to keep the mystery.

But with the pull being teenagers and one of the teenagers being my mean sister of course my ideas weren’t even put into consideration and everyone got mad at me for no reason even though I was just proposing ideas.

She’s not sure what to do.

Thanksgiving is coming up which is when we usually pull and at this point I’m debating on telling my aunt not to put my name in the hat.

Secret santa isn’t about knowing exactly what you get and who its from, it’s about mystery and the question how well you know the person you got.

So reddit, should I suck it up and do the secret santa, force them to fill out a form, or drop out?

Sara is the problem here, and the older cousins. They should just keep following the rules.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person shares how the gift exchange works in their family.

Here’s a suggestion not to participate this year.

Here’s another vote for dropping out.

But another person suggests participating this year.

Gift giving isn’t always fun.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.