Pakjes Avond

Our family (like many families) has a Christmas tradition of picking names and buying presents for each other. We do it on a different day than Christmas, because Mom and Dad want Christmas to be about Christ, not gifts. We call the celebration Pakjes Avond, which is Dutch (literally) for "package open." When we were young, Mom and Dad would to do all the gift giving, but now our family is growing up. We used to pick names from a hat at thanksgiving dinner, but now because of us growing up and getting families of our own, and the fact that half of us live in Canada and the rest live in the U.S. we don't get together for Thanksgiving anymore, so the hat is hard to pass around... We do alot of our interaction using the internet or telephone becuase of the distance, and though it loses alot of its "gezellig"-ness, I am developing a virtual hat, which I have named Pakjes Avond... though I think I need a better name... and maybe a brand or logo... So far I have the name picker done, and I am working on automating another part of the process that we used to do by email, namely the wishlists. We would just send our wishlists using the "Reply All" feature, but the problem is that the lists would get out of sync, and someone would have to maintain the list, and that made things less jolly... so I am hoping this will make our season a little more simple... What I would like is ideas to make this better... and if you want to implement this for your family, let me know... I won't let you into my family's implementation, because that would make our little private family place less cozy, but I would be willing to let anyone interested see the source.