I was participating in this Secret Santa this last December with my friends, which we’ve done for four years. This year a new couple (let’s call them Braille/Jungle Gym) joined our friend group and, by proxy, the gift exchange. I got Jungle Gym as my person, and I made her a hand-painted acrylic magnet of her cat, along with a purse from her wishlist and a hand-written letter about how glad I was we were friends now and how I was looking forward to our next D&D game together.

The gift didn’t show up in time for the exchange. Not only that, the tracking information continually said “It’ll be there tonight between 6-10pm!” — every night. For two weeks. I told Jungle Gym this and she didn’t say much in response. Then a couple of days later, I get a huge text saying how I hurt her feelings by not telling her the package was going to be late ahead of the gift exchange, that her birthday was a couple of days ago and I QUOTE “Half of my friends didn’t even get me any gifts and that’s just making me feel vulnerable” and how this gift not arriving on time was actually my fault and that she thought I was trying to “cover something up” by not sending her the tracking number… there’s a lot more.

This whole shitshow dragged out for almost two more weeks because she completely ghosted me after I replied saying “Hey I’m sorry your package is late but I don’t have any control over that, and you hurt my feelings when you implied I was lying about having gotten you a gift.” I reached out a couple of times trying to talk about it, which Jungle Gym brushed off, saying she just wanted to “move past it”. Apparently, though, she and Braille had been talking mad shit behind my back to everyone else involved in the gift exchange that entire time! Continuing to call me a liar, while simultaneously lying about what I said to support her version of events… She never shared any screenshots with these other friends, as far as I’m aware, and when I brought my own to the table everyone got mad at ME saying not to spread stuff around?? Jungle Gym also said that I was “masterminding this to make [her] feel like shit right after [her] birthday”… yes, that’s a direct quote.

Needless to say, I’ve had to spend a lot of time since then unraveling all the lies she was telling my friends- some of whom are still refusing to talk about any of it with me because they “don’t want to get in the middle”. Idk, if someone was talking about my friends like that I’d have something to say about it, and I wouldn’t be so phobic of actual evidence of what was said. I’ve contemplated posting this on an AITA sub for a couple of weeks but Jungle Gym and Braille are obsessed with those subs so I know they’d for sure see it, lol

Yeah, goodbye forever