The crap calendar: the Secret Santa present the whole office reads out loud (2027 edition)

The parcel you open in front of everyone

In Ireland they call it Kris Kindle, in most British offices Secret Santa, and the rule is the same on both sides of the Irish Sea: you open it in public. Paper crown from the cracker still on, a warm glass of something in the other hand, a dozen colleagues leaning in to see whether whoever drew your name has the faintest idea who you are. The budget is too small for a real present and just big enough for a real mistake.

So the same things come round every year. The scented candle. The mug that says World’s Best Boss, handed to someone who is not the boss. The novelty socks. The chocolate orange, which at least gets eaten. Polite presents, politely received, and forgotten in a desk drawer long before January payday finally arrives.

And then there is the parcel that makes the whole room laugh. It gets passed along the table, photographed, and it is on somebody’s story before the mince pies have gone round. Lately, more and more often, it is a calendar. Not a pretty calendar. A crap one.

Where the crap calendar comes from

Britain and Ireland have no shortage of rude calendars, where the joke is mostly the swearing. This one works differently, and it comes from France, where it appeared a few years ago with a simple promise: a calendar that doesn’t wish you a happy new year, but tells you what the year is really going to be like. Grumbling about a year before it has even started is practically a national sport over there. Turning it into a calendar turned it into a present.

What they understood is that the months themselves are the joke. Everybody lives through the same year. January is the obvious one: somewhere around the third week people start posting that it has lasted sixty days, then ninety, and nobody argues. Dry January — a proper campaign, run by the charity Alcohol Change UK — makes it longer still for the people doing it, and quite a lot longer for the people sitting next to them. You don’t need to know whoever opens the parcel to laugh with them about that.

Even Blue Monday, the day in January that is supposed to be the most depressing of the year, has a back story that deserves its place on a crap calendar, and the historical record is short. It first appeared in 2005, in a press release put out for a travel company, Sky Travel, with a “formula” credited to Cliff Arnall. The saddest day of the year began life as an advert for booking a holiday. It is always the third Monday of January; in 2027, that is the 18th.

2027 has already written half the jokes

Good news for whoever is buying: 2027 has done most of the work. The year opens on a Friday, so you get one day off, a weekend that feels like a trap, and then Monday. Easter comes early, which means April — usually the month of the long weekend — has no bank holiday at all. And Christmas Day lands on a Saturday, Boxing Day on a Sunday, so the days off slide into the following week, which is fine until someone tries to work out when the office actually shuts.

Then there is the small masterpiece. Easter Sunday 2027 is 28 March, and it is also the night the clocks go forward: the whole country loses an hour’s sleep on the very morning it is meant to be hunting for eggs. Autumn pays it back with the same sense of humour — the clocks go back in the small hours of Halloween, one extra hour for being frightened. And the only Friday the 13th of the year turns up in August, when half the office is on a beach and won’t even notice. The month names on our poster lean on all of that rather than on a generic January.

Twelve months you rename yourself

A calendar off the Secret Santa shelf is the same for everyone who buys it. Ours is put together by you: a 2027 poster on which you rename every month. So that you aren’t left staring at twelve empty boxes at eleven at night, each month comes with ten suggestions written for that year — “Januarghh”, “Clocks stole an hour”, “Glastonbury FOMO”, “Fireworks. Dog’s fuming.” — a button picks the whole lot at random, and you can always type your own, up to twenty-four characters.

It is also a real calendar, and that changes how long it lives. Every month has its grid of days, weeks starting on Monday, weekends marked, and three dates circled in felt tip: their birthday, the start of the holidays, the day they finally retire. A poster of jokes gets looked at for a week. A calendar you check to see when the August bank holiday falls stays on the wall all year, and the joke stays with it.

The title and the line underneath are yours too. “Property of Dave. Hands off.” tends to land, particularly once it is hanging above Dave’s desk. Six loud palettes, from neon yellow on black to bubblegum pink, and a size for every wall: A4 at €19.90 for the office, up to 70 × 100 cm for the flat’s living room. Each one is printed to order and delivered in Ireland and across the EU.

Who to give it to, and who to spare

Its natural habitat is Secret Santa, Kris Kindle and the office Christmas do. And it has an advantage few funny presents have: it doesn’t make fun of anybody. The year takes the hit, not the colleague. You can give it to someone you barely know without that awful pause, and to someone you know very well with your own jokes slipped into the months.

Away from the office it works for the brother or sister who has complained about January since school, the housemates who need a real calendar on the kitchen wall, the friend who is retiring (write “Holiday” in all twelve boxes and leave it at that) or the cousin who has just moved into a first flat. For a nan who has had the same charity calendar by the phone for thirty years, we will leave that to your judgement.

One piece of advice that changes everything: put one real piece of information in the three circled dates. Their birthday, the date of the gig, the day they joined the team. That is the little detail that makes someone say “hang on, he thought of that” in the middle of the laughing.

The present that ends up on camera

A crap calendar has a rare quality for a twenty-euro present: it gets discovered in stages. You unroll it, read January, laugh, look for your birthday month, stop at December. That is exactly the rhythm of a short video, and it is why it so often ends up on Instagram or TikTok before the end of the day.

If you want it to work on screen, film the face, not the poster: someone reading their months out loud beats any trending sound. And if you have hidden a real joke about someone on the team in June, don’t show it until they find it themselves. That is the bit everyone will want to watch again.