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

I don't know if this is too late for you. I just created a web app that will do something very similiar to this - http://www.secretsantaswap.com/

You can import contacts from Gmail/Hotmail/Outlook, and you can designate subgroups that won't be matched with one another (e.g. bill and lisa never want to get each other's names). I email each participant with their target. Participants can have the same email address (for instance, a parent could receive all of the emails for their child).