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Your Facebook friends list grows by the day and your circle of best friends widens by the hour.

But your bank account has sprung a leak reminiscent of that of the Titanic, and it’s only 2,275,000 seconds until Christmas.

And you still have all your family and friends to buy gifts for.

“I love Christmas,” said freshman Erin Heckmann, a music education major, “but I don’t have any money, so I normally just send cards to my friends.”

But the real question is: who do you give to?

Your family? Does that include your second cousin, twice removed?

What about your friends?

“I just give my closest friends gifts and everyone else cards,” said Daniel Reams, a sophomore music education major.

Determining who to shop for has spawned many gift exchanging ideas over the years, and a Web site, Secretsanta.com, offers many feasible holiday gift-giving ideas for the college population.

The Yankee Swap, is popular in offices across the U.S., and suitable for small or large groups. In Yankee Swap, each participant brings a wrapped, unmarked gift and places it in a designated area. Guests are given numbers as they arrive, or their names are randomly drawn, and they select and unwrap gifts from the pile in that order – with a twist.

The first person will pick a gift (that is not their own) from the pile and open it for all to see.

The number two person chooses a gift and opens it, and then decides whether to keep it or swap it for the first player’s gift. Each person in order then gets to select a present, open it and decide whether to keep it or swap.

All the presents have to be chosen. In the end, the gift you are holding is the gift you take home.

Another idea made popular by an episode of the sitcom “Seinfeld” is called regifting. The process of regifting, or passing a gift you have already received to someone else, predates the 90s and Seinfeld.

The most simple and thoughtful of gift-giving ideas is “Secret Santa.” Many poeple choose this method beause of its ease and the thought that must go into the gifts.

Participants enter all of their names into a hat, each choosing one name randomly. Then they buy a gift for the one person whose name they pulled.

“It’s fun to get little gifts over an extended period of time,” said Heckmann. “It’s like Hanukah,” she joked.

The fun of this style of gift-giving lies in its secrecy, but many groups of friends or family find it hard to hold their tongues until the holiday.

Sometimes this method can be flawed, especially when a person draws the name of someone they aren’t familiar with.

According to Heckmann, large groups of friends should choose another gift exchange.

“I have a friend who does it with her circle of friends, and my mom does it with her office, but I think it would be kind of crazy if you tried to do it with the entire music school,” Heckmann said.

Though he has never actually participated in a Secret Santa exchange, Reams is acquainted with the rules and regulations. He commented on the inequality of cost and value of presents.

“Some people give gifts that are really expensive, while others give gifts that are really inexpensive,” said Reams. “There needs to be a spending limit set.”

Overall, Secret Santa is used by many to cut down on the number of gifts a person must buy. Rather than buying gifts for every one of your 30 cousins, purchasing one bottle of Stetson for Uncle Bobby is much less straining on your wallet.