Tag Archives: secret santa

“The Yellow Ribbon”

Genre: Folk Narrative – Ghost Story

Text:

A man named Johnny was going out for coffee one day when he saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He introduced himself to the woman, whose name was Jane, and the two of them began to fall in love. Everything about Jane was perfect, but there was one thing that confused Johnny: every single day, Jane wore a yellow ribbon around her neck.

“Do you ever take it off?” Johnny finally asked her after a month of dating. Jane told him that she never takes it off, even to sleep, and that he should never untie it. But even though Johnny pushed and pushed, she would never tell him why.

“One day, I’ll tell you,” Jane would always say whenever he asked.

The years went by and Johnny and Jane fell deeper in love and eventually, Johnny proposed to her. Yet every day, Jane still wore the same yellow ribbon around her neck.

The night before their wedding, Johnny finally had enough. He decided he absolutely needed to see what was under that ribbon, that he couldn’t wait a single day longer.

That night, Johnny waited for Jane to fall asleep. When he was certain she was sound asleep, he reached over to her neck and gently tugged on the end of the ribbon to untie it…

But when Johnny pulled the ribbon undone, he realized why exactly Jane had worn it every single day: because without the ribbon to hold it in place, her head rolled right off her neck and onto the floor, where Jane’s eyes slowly opened.

“Oh Johnny,” she said, even though her severed head was now a few feet away from her body. “I told you not to untie the ribbon.”

Context:

“I first heard this story from my older brother when I was growing up, but I heard it a few times throughout my childhood at places like childcare centers and in elementary school. I think it’s a pretty common ghost story among kids. I always thought it was creepy to think about a woman’s head being held onto her body by only a ribbon, and for a while, I was scared of anyone I saw wearing a ribbon or a thick choker around their neck.”

Analysis:

The theme of this story seems to be trust within a relationship: Jane withheld a secret from Johnny – the only apparent “fault” about her. But Johnny could not trust her enough to live without knowing what the secret was, and it was his scheming/distrustful nature that led to him trying to discover the answer on his own and accidentally revealing that Jane’s neck was severed. The implication of this happening the night before their wedding suggests that a lack of trust within a couple is potentially ruinous to a marriage. However, another possible interpretation is to take the opposite stance: that it is withholding secrets from one’s partner that destroys a marriage, and that the skeletons of one’s past will always end up being revealed.

Secret Santa, but make it competitive

C is 32, he was born in Visalia, California. He grew up with a foster family in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He told me about his foster family’s take on secret Santa.

“There was a family tradition I had with my foster family… every Thanksgiving we would put names in a hat and we would draw names on Thanksgiving and it’s like secret Santa… and we buy that person a gift… whoever’s name we got… and everyone would try and guess who got who and if they guess the person that drew their name, they could have their gift but if they didn’t they would have to wait until Christmas Eve. It got really competitive (laughs)”

Secret Santa is widely credited in America to a philanthropist named Larry Dean Stewart. Stewart struggled in his younger years, and reportedly was giving help and hope by the generous contributions of strangers at low points in his life. When he became a millionaire in the cable and telephone business, he decided to “pay it forward” by handing out $100 bills and large anonymous cash donations (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15751409). Secret Santa, however, is a tradition that goes back much further. One Scandinavian tradition known as Julklapp, involves throwing presents into people’s doorways and running away after knocking (https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Julklapp). Around the world, other anonymous gift traditions exist around various holidays, like Amigo Secreto or Angelito on Valentine’s Day in Latin Countries (https://blog.willamette.edu/worldnews/2010/02/22/amigo-secreto/).

Secret Santa/Secret Sister Gift Exchange

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Thousand Oaks, California
Performance Date: 4/20/2020
Primary Language: English

Background: The informant is my college roommate and friend. She spent the first fifteen years of her life in Minneapolis, Minnesota before moving to Thousand Oaks, California for high school. She is currently in her twenties and attends school at the University of Southern California. She was on a women’s basketball team all four years of high school.

Main Piece:

“So Secret Santa is basically where you have a group of people come together and anonymously everyone gets assigned a person and they either buy them multiple gifts or just one and then you do like a gift exchange at a certain ate and then you try to figure out who your secret Santa is, or you just find out when you get your present.”

Context: Beyond the brief description my informant gave me, she clarified a few additional logistical details. Secret Santa, or Secret Sister as they called it, was done every year on the high school women’s basketball team. The team captains organized it for about fifteen participants, and people filled out a premade form of things they liked (favorite color, favorite movie, favorite candy, etc) to make shopping easier. There was a fifteen to twenty-dollar spending limit. The informant isn’t entirely sure on the timeline, but she thinks that people dropped off gifts in the locker room shortly before the first home game of the season and opened them when they were done playing (in January usually) She also remarked that people liked to guess who their gift-giver was, but there wasn’t any sort of process or reward for guessing correctly.

Thoughts: It’s interesting that my informant referred to this exchange as both “Secret Santa” and “Secret Sister”—besides the process of gift-giving, nothing else ties this ritual to the Christian celebration of Christmas or Santa. Instead, it’s built entirely around a sports team folk group, and occurs in January to correspond with the first home game of the season, rather than the holiday in December. I’ve seen longer versions of this “Secret Sister” play out in both high school sports teams (always women, and always multiple gifts spread out over an entire competitive season) and in university sororities. I wonder if men’s sports teams and other club organizations also do something similar and if so, what term it would fall under, since “Secret Sisters” is gender-exclusive and “Secret Santa” implies a Christian/holiday-centered context.