Inflation hits "Dirty Santa"
From the Editor's Desk
Arthur McLean
Times are getting tougher and things are getting more expensive these days. And it's starting to show up in some places that you might not have expected.

Take for example, the "Dirty Santa" Christmas gift. For those of you who don't know, "Dirty Santa" isn't adult-oriented as they say, it's a Christmas-time game where everyone at the office or Sunday School class buys a Christmas gift and the gifts all get thrown into a pot. A random selection of numbers determines the order who gets to draw one of any of the gifts in the pot. The dirty part comes when players get to "steal" the good gifts.

Most of the time, the value of the gifts is kept to a range between $5 and $10, so the big spenders won't show off and the cheapskates don't slide by with a bag full of clothespins or something.

Some companies seem to make a mint focusing on the Dirty Santa niche. Take a look at Wal-Mart. All those displays that crop up this time of year loaded with odd ball gifts usually range in price from around $5 to $10. They might as well call it the Dirty Santa isle.

It's right out there for everyone to see and makes it easy for those of us harried Christmas shoppers who have to get gifts for the Dirty Santa game at the Christmas party. And who wants to put a lot of time and thoughtfulness into getting a gift that may wind up in the hands of someone you don't particularly like? The Dirty Santa isle comes to the rescue.

There are of course, downsides to shopping the Dirty Santa isle. The selection can be pretty hit or miss. You might find the $1 bag of practice golf balls and the $1 bag of golf tees suddenly thrown in a chrome bucket with a $9.98 price tag hanging off it.

Those are the sucker gifts. You think, hey the boss likes golf, maybe he'll appreciate the person who got something like that and then I can casually let it slip after the party that, I was the one who brought the great golf gift. No, the boss knows that's about $4 worth of golf junk that he already has, so no brownie points there.

Now, in any Dirty Santa game, there's usually only a small handful of really choice gifts that everyone fights over. Then there's a lot in the middle that's okay, and a handful of stuff that no one really wants. Sometimes the fun part is trying to figure out if the bad gifts were purchased because of a lack of time or taste or just out of devious spite.

In browsing the Dirty Santa isle this year, it seemed the quality of gifts was spottier than ever. The good stuff was almost always above that magic $10 barrier.

I have a feeling that inflation may be hitting the Dirty Santa niche hard this year, and that next year, I predict Dirty Santa price guide may increase by as much as $5. So far Alan Greenspan and current federal reserve chief Ben Bernanke have not yet mentioned Dirty Santa prices when talking about the economy, but I figure it's only a matter of time that the Dirty Santa gift is seen as a leading indicator when it comes to assessing the health of our economy.

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