Christmas used to have an entire underground transportation system.
Shopping bags disappeared into trunks beneath winter coats. Toys were moved between houses after dark. Closets became restricted airspace sometime around Thanksgiving, and grandmothers were routinely recruited as off-site storage facilities.
It wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but it worked for one important reason: the presents came home with us.
We controlled the entrance. You waited until the kids were upstairs or sent someone into another room. If the gift was too big to hide, you left it at your mother’s house until Christmas Eve and hoped she remembered which blanket she’d thrown over it.
Then we started shopping online. Now Christmas rings the doorbell.
The internet made Christmas shopping easier. Hiding Christmas is another story.
Last holiday season, Americans spent a record $257.8 billion online, according to Adobe Analytics. More than half of those purchases were made from our phones.
There is something remarkable about being able to buy your husband a Christmas present while sitting next to him on the sofa. You can compare prices, read 600 reviews, order it and pay for it without moving more than your thumb.
The difficult part comes later, when a delivery driver walks toward the house carrying it.
Sometimes the internet doesn’t even bother preserving the mystery. Amazon’s Ships in Product Packaging program allows eligible products to travel in the manufacturer’s original packaging, without an additional Amazon box. It’s a sensible effort to reduce packaging. It’s somewhat less helpful when the manufacturer’s packaging includes a large photograph of the exact thing you were hoping to hide.
Then there is the house itself, which has apparently joined the investigation.
Shared shopping accounts leave clues. Recommendations have long memories. Delivery notifications appear on phones and screens. Alexa has shopping-notification settings that allow customers to control whether item names are announced or displayed, including items that might be gifts.
We’ve reached a fascinating point in human history where successfully surprising your family at Christmas may require adjusting the privacy settings on your house.
Consumer Reports has even published instructions for hiding Amazon gift orders, with advice covering household accounts, browsing histories and Alexa notifications.
Twenty years ago, you had to worry about someone finding the bag in the trunk.
Now the Wi-Fi might rat you out.
Getting it through the door is only the beginning
Assuming the package arrives without announcing itself, you still have to put it somewhere.
Every household has its places. The top of the closet. The spare bedroom. Under the bed. The trunk of the car. Maybe the garage, provided the person you’re shopping for has absolutely no reason to go into the garage for the next five weeks.
These arrangements work beautifully until somebody needs a suitcase, drops an earring or asks to borrow your car.
Large gifts introduce their own problems. A bicycle has very little interest in being discreet. Neither does a television or the enormous box containing the thing you were quite certain would arrive disassembled.
And then there’s the person who works from home.
Every delivery becomes a small operation. You watch the tracking. You calculate when the truck might arrive. You hope they’re on a call when the doorbell rings.
Instead, they appear in the hallway holding the box.
“What did you order?”
Nothing.
Why are you holding it?
This is an extraordinary amount of planning for something we bought online because it was supposed to be convenient.
Perhaps the hiding problem doesn’t always need a better hiding place.
Maybe the secret simply shouldn’t come home.
Give Santa a second address
There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about this solution.
Before online shopping, people routinely hid presents somewhere other than their own houses. Your mother kept something. Your sister kept something. A neighbor might have a suspiciously large box in the garage until December 24.
The internet didn’t make that idea obsolete. It simply gave us the ability to choose the hiding place before the package ever ships.
That’s where the Holiday Secret Keeper comes in.
During the holidays, The Drop Spot can become the address you use at checkout. The packages arrive here instead of at the house, where they stay inside until you’re ready for them.
And there is no reason to conduct a risk assessment over every order. Send the Christmas present. Send the ordinary Amazon box next to it. Send the thing you forgot you ordered.
Nobody at home needs to know which box contains shampoo and which one contains Christmas.
We receive packages. We don’t ruin Christmas.
But hiding Christmas is only part of what makes November complicated.
Santa Never Did All This Himself
For someone who gets all the credit for Christmas, Santa has a remarkable amount of help.
An entire workshop. A team handling production. Someone keeping track of deliveries. Presumably, an elf whose only responsibility is making sure nobody discovers what’s under the wrapping paper.
The rest of us have considerably smaller operations.
We buy the presents, figure out where to hide them, pack the ones going out of town and somehow find time to return the things that didn’t work out. Somewhere along the way, a shipping label needs printing, a package needs dropping off, and the gift for your mother in Detroit is still sitting on the dining room table.
It’s a peculiar feature of modern Christmas. We can buy almost everything without leaving the sofa, but getting it all where it needs to go can still consume an entire Saturday.
I’ve always thought Santa had the right idea about this. Not the flying reindeer, necessarily, but the division of labor.
There’s something to be said for having a place that can receive the presents you don’t want discovered, pack and ship the ones headed elsewhere, and take care of a few of those errands you’ve been meaning to get around to.
Christmas is complicated enough without making every package a separate project.
Santa has an entire North Pole operation.
Your Christmas secret. Your year-round convenience.
The Drop Spot at Ship Orlando is ready to be your Holiday Secret Keeper. Give your packages another place to land this Christmas, and you may discover it’s an address you’ll want to keep long after the decorations come down.
Make The Drop Spot your second delivery address.
We can’t give you November back. But we might be able to give you part of your Saturday.
This post is for general information only. Retailer packaging options and smart-device notification settings change often, so check the current settings in your own apps and accounts.
