Bill Gates got one lucky Reddit user an incredibly thoughtful Secret Santa gift

19.12.2015 23:47

For more than five years years, thousands of Redditors have participated in a Reddit Secret Santa gift exchange. A whopping 120,650 users signed up this year, including — for the third year running — Bill Gates.

Both previous years that Gates participated, he bestowed his partners with a book and a donation to charity in their name (along with some other goodies), tailoring each selection based on information he could glean from each person's Reddit account. This year, he followed the same general format, and his gift to user NayaTheNinja ended up being incredibly thoughtful.

Gates gifted Naya a bunch of outdoor adventure equipment including a new tent, a mosquito net, and camping chair, a hand-picked playlist, a book called "Thing Explainer," and a donation to the charity Malaria No More.

"I don't think that I can offer enough thanks to my Santa for this whole experience," she writes on her Reddit gift page.

Reddit Secret Santa

Gates' himself has long been vocally passionate about curing malaria, but Naya herself had a special connection to the cause: While visiting a friend in the Peace Corp in Zambia last year, she found herself blown away by how serious an issue it was there.

Although she writes that she loves the hiking gear Gates sent her, she loves the contribution to Malaria No More even more.

"The donation will help create a lasting effect on people other than myself," she writes.

Also as usual, Gates included in his package a picture of himself.

"You and I have something in common: We both hate mosquitoes!" Gates wrote in his Secret Santa note. "One of my Secret Santa presents to you is a donation in your name to Malaria No More, because no child should ever die of a mosquito bite."

Pretty darn sweet.

Read the rest of NayaTheNinja's post here and check out some stats about this year's Secret Santa:

Reddit Secret Santa