What is the best low-tech protocol to simulate drawing names out of a hat and ensure secrecy?

Question

Each year at Thanksgiving, my family has drawn names out of a hat to determine who they\'ll be a \"Secret Santa\" for the Christmas gift exchange. It\'s important to our fam

Answer 1

Well, there has to be an element of trust since you could easily cheat, but if you want to simply avoid accidentally seeing the gift assignments, how about assigning a large random numbers to everyone, the create a list for everyone of people and their code numbers, and print individual sheets with for each person with the code of the person they "draw". In that way, without the effort of memorizing the number and looking it up on the list, you likely interpret "Bob got assigned to 0785286741234" as "Bob got assigned to Kelly". I'd probably make the first and last few digits the same for everyone so you can't simply recall that Bob got 7-something and there was only one random entry starting with a 7. Bury the differences deeper into the numerical string. See how they get "lost" visually:

0785253451234 Bob

0785286741234 Kelly

0785238761234 Herman

0785200281234 Lydia