Remember when you were a kid at Christmas-time and half the fun was finding out where your parents had stashed your presents (this is obviously a little after you’ve found out about Santa Claus)?

But then the surprise on the day was snuffed out by actually knowing what you were getting? (I won’t even get into not liking what you’ve been given.)

While as adults it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that your partner will go snooping for that anniversary/birthday/Christmas/Valentines Day gift you’ve been keeping in a safe place, there are four other ways that the surprise can be ruined.

1. Telling someone close what you’ve got planned. While most people don’t mean to spoil a surprise, the psychological pressure of keeping a secret can be overwhelming. If your recipient mentions how much they like X product/service, it’s all-too-human to “share” the news in advance to please them. It also happens when they mention that they plan to buy said item and your “helpful” gift ally wants to cut them off at the pass. Tell a Scorpio if you have to tell anyone. They can keep a secret.

2. Sharing an email address. If you and your beloved happen to share the same email address and you order online, the surprise will be no-more. Here’s an interesting example of how LL Bean gets round it. You might want to use your work one, or set up a free one at Hotmail (or Live as it wants to be called now), Yahoo or Gmail purely for online gift purchases.

3. Getting it delivered at home. Unless it’s absolutely massive eg a car, it’s pretty easy to get the gift sent instead to your work address (and they may have a locked address bag/PO Box to ensure its safe arrival) or to a helpful (Scorpio) friend’s or parent’s address to hold it for you. This beats racing your partner to the mailbox so they don’t see their present arrive. Even if it has been gift-wrapped by the company in question, it’ll still have their company address on the package which kinda gives the game away.

4. Credit card statements. If you go through your finances togethers, seeing “Mary’s Red-Hot Lingerie” or whatever on the statement is either a dead giveaway that your partner is getting lingerie, your (other) partner is getting lingerie, or hey, that you like to wear lingerie. None of these results is particularly pallatable. Buy using Paypal and they’ll be none the wiser.

Tags: anniversary gifts, birthday gifts, buying gifts online, Christmas gifts, planning ahead, surprise gifts, Valentines Day

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 1:19 am and is filed under Valentines Day gifts, gift ideas, gifts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.