Door 12 · Brain
Secret Santa Shuffle: Day 12 of Sunburnt Santa
The hats lift to show what's hiding under each one (a koala, a roo, a pav), then drop and shuffle, and you have to find the one you're asked for. It starts with two hats and builds to five, faster every round.
How to play Secret Santa Shuffle
- The hats lift to show what sits under each one: a koala, a roo, a pav... Remember where.
- The hats drop and shuffle, then you get asked for one. Tap the hat hiding it. More hats and faster every round.
- Tap within 1.5 seconds for a speed bonus. A wrong hat is a strike; three strikes and the round is over.
Scoring
| What | Points |
|---|---|
| Finding the right hat | 100 per hat on the table |
| Speed bonus (found within 1.5 seconds) | 50 per hat on the table |
| Wrong hat, or no pick within 12 seconds | a strike (three strikes ends the game) |
Two hats for rounds 1 and 2, three for rounds 3 and 4, four for 5 and 6, then five from round 7. A quick find with five hats is worth 750. After a strike the game moves on to the next round, hats and speed going up as usual.
Stars: the three targets
Stars don't lock anything; they show how you're going, and doors with at least one star count towards the bonus games.
Tips for three stars
- Three stars (7,000) means a quick, clean find on roughly the first 12 rounds. The speed bonus adds half again, so don't sit on the answer once you know it.
- You don't know which item will be asked for until the shuffle ends, so learn the table while the hats are up. With two or three hats, follow all but one; the last one is wherever the others aren't.
- The item you're asked for is never the same as last round's, which rules one out. From four hats, two pairs often swap at the same time, and the look before the hats drop shrinks from 2 seconds to 1, so pick one hat to follow and let the others go.
The real story: Secret Santa and Kris Kringle
Secret Santa is the office and family gift swap. Australia's Macquarie Dictionary describes it as a group of people exchanging gifts at Christmas, each giving a present to one other randomly chosen member of the group, usually with a price limit [1]. It also notes the other name you'll hear across Australia: Kris Kringle [1]. Rules change from group to group, the dictionary says, and one popular version has everyone bring a gift, usually a funny one, to a pile, then take turns choosing, with the chance to steal someone else's [1].
Kris Kringle started out as someone else entirely. The name comes from the German Christkind or Christkindl, the "Christ-child" gift-bringer of Germany, Switzerland and Austria [2]. German immigrants took the tradition to America, where the name was anglicised in the first half of the 1800s; the spelling "Kris Kringle" shows up in a Philadelphia newspaper advertisement in December 1841 [2]. By the middle of the century it was just another name for Santa Claus [2].
So when your workplace draws names out of a hat for Kris Kringle, it's using a German name for the gift-bringer, by way of Philadelphia. In Day 12 the hats come first, and the presents are hiding underneath.
Read more: Aussie Christmas slang: a dictionary for visitors.
When it opens
Door 12 opens on day 12 of your own calendar (your Day 1 is the day you first play), and for everyone by 12 December. Play the door before it to open it. Once it's open you can replay it as often as you like, and after Christmas Eve all 24 doors stay open. How the calendar works.
Play now
Same kind of game: Light Show, Thong Pairs, True Blue Quiz.
Sources for the real story
- Secret Santa, Macquarie Dictionary
- Kris Kringle, Wordorigins.org (David Wilton)