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Five winter-holiday gifts Daniel got that Jack never admitted came from him
For five years in a row Jack uses his clout behind the SGC holiday scenes to get himself assigned as Daniel's Secret Santa.
The first year, Daniel unwraps his Desktop Carnivorous Plant Set, squints up at Jack, and says, "You're not my Secret Santa, are you?" Jack says no such luck, and spends the rest of the morning trying to hunt up stuff to feed the plant. Two geriatric houseflies and a half-squashed giant mutant mosquito later, Daniel bans Jack from his lab for the rest of the day because he's casting speculative looks in the direction of the fish tank.
The second year, Jack swings by Daniel's lab to find him peering closely at his new Pyramidal Ant Colony with Genuine Egyptian Sand (and optional mouse miniature pharaoh bones, painstakingly arranged over the top surface of sand in a ring representing a stargate). "What's up?" Jack says, and Daniel says, "I think somebody swapped the sand in this for Abydonian sand. See how this appears to be almost entirely composed of non-sedimentary white quartzite with that pale beige-ish cast unique to the Lower Karellan Plateau where the gate is located on Abydos? No matter how they cleaned or sifted it, Libyan or Saharan desert sand or even sedimentary sandy clay from the Nile Delta would inevitably contain a certain percentage of gypsum and smectite and limestone-type marine deposits -- North Africa was under water for most of the Mesozoic, while the Abydonian deserts are mainly the result of glacial activity and were never seabeds ... " Jack comes out of his comatose glaze when he realizes that Daniel's not peering through the clear plastic pyramid anymore but up at him. "This so came from you," Daniel says, and Jack says, "I'm so not smart enough to come up with something like this." Daniel humphs. They put the ants in together, and only a few of them fall and escape into the office clutter.
The third year, Jack swings by Daniel's lab to find him staring dumbfounded at a handful of Smart Mass Thinking Putty (Alien Ooze version). "Oh, cool!" Jack says. He plucks the packaging off the desk to stop himself from plucking the goop out of Daniel's hands -- he'd really kinda wanted to keep this one for himself -- and reads out the description: 'the ultimate stress reduction office toy.' "Wish I had your Secret Santa," he says, and Daniel says, "Yeah, right now I wish I had yours, because you are my Secret Santa, Jack. And this stuff's gonna get all over everything." "Nah," Jack says. "See here? 'The putty is non-toxic and doesn't leave any gooey residue.' Plus if it were me you'd just get a box with a note inside ordering you to see the base massage therapist more than once a decade."
The fourth year, Daniel gets a set of radio-controlled inflatable battling sumo wrestlers. Jack's not there when he opens the gift. It turns out that was for the best; Daniel's office isn't electromagnetically shielded, and the radio controller has unforeseeable effects on equipment in other areas of the SGC. Jack stays well away from the ensuing fireworks so that he can claim complete ignorance of the entire thing. He rethinks his strategy of going to thinkgeek.com and ordering stuff he'd like. Next year, he vows, he'll order something Daniel will like. And that won't activate UAVs in their storage bays.
The fifth year, Daniel looks up from the blanket he's fondling -- a soft, fuzzy black throw with a giant caffeine molecule woven into it in glaring neon green -- and says, "You have been my Secret Santa every single year, haven't you." Jack shakes his head vehemently and gets out of the office as fast as he can, because he had no idea that there'd be fondling, for cryin' out loud, and he's this close to losing it and admitting that it was him.
In the end, Jack never cracks, and although Daniel finds out the truth during the year when he's a higher being, when he comes back into corporeal form he claims he doesn't remember anything about it.
Five winter-holiday gifts Jack got that Daniel never admitted came from him
For five years straight, Daniel sweet-talks the person organizing the Secret Santa gift exchange to ensure that he's Jack's Secret Santa.
The first year, Jack gets a table knock-hockey set that Daniel hopes will motivate Jack to spend more time in his own office, but the gift backfires on him when the set somehow keeps migrating to Daniel's office instead, where errant pucks wreak havoc on the bric-a-brac.
The second year, Jack has just unwrapped his one-of-a-kind General Hammond action figure (custom-made by a company Daniel found on the Web, using Hammond's publicly-available official Air Force portrait photos) when they hear the real General Hammond coming down the corridor. "I'm on my way to see Colonel O'Neill right now," they hear him say, as every one of Jack's desk drawers refuses to open. Just as Hammond walks in, they panic and stuff the figure into the ventilation shaft, where it will one day be found by some extremely puzzled member of the custodial staff, or maybe an environmental engineer on a random inspection, or maybe Siler. Or maybe not at all; they never do hear it hit bottom.
The third year, Jack gets a set of books entitled Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things and Sneakier Uses for Everyday Things. Flipping through the books, he mutters things like "Oh, c'mon, we tried that in special ops and I'm tellin' ya, it never works" and "Hmm, now, that has potential ... " He barely looks up, and he doesn't come anywhere near getting the (admittedly way obscure) suggestion that there might be interesting uses not just for some of the things right under his nose but for some of the people, too. At least he's not grumbling that any Secret Santa worth his salt would have just given him a decent Leatherman. Daniel knows he's been needing a new one since the incident with Daniel's malfunctioning (and possibly sentient) office swivel chair, but on the off chance that Jack does cotton on, he can't quite bring himself to make the implicit suggestion of a tool with that brand name.
The fourth year, Jack gets a fuzzy red Christmas stocking filled with coal. Well, it's not really coal; it's barbecue briquettes. But Daniel wasn't going out of his way to acquire chunks of real coal, and he figures he's made his point, whether or not Jack ever works out who his Santa was.
The fifth year, Jack gets an olive branch, and Daniel's sure he'll connect the dots. But there was that dispute with Siler the week before over who ate the last of the commissary Jell-O, and there's the ongoing battle with Harriman about the default font on the dialing interface display, and Reynolds has been trying to make peace over that parking-lot thing for years -- there are just too many other suspects. That year, Daniel's sorry for the first time that he manipulated the process. Jack seems sincerely moved, but it never even crosses his mind that the peace offering might have come from Daniel. It's Daniel he comes to for help identifying this freaky piece of foliage he received, and it's Daniel's Guide to Mediterranean Plants and Trees they use to make the identification, and it's Daniel he gets to confirm the metaphor for him. ("Noah's Ark? Forty days of rain? Sent a dove out, came back with an olive branch, sign of solid land?" "Somebody's trying to tell me there's solid land nearby?" "It was a peace offering from God, Jack. Have you read Genesis?") But he never makes the connection. Daniel's this close to coming clean from sheer annoyance when they're called to duty. That afternoon they gate to Kelowna, and he never gets the chance to 'fess up.
And one gift they both got that Jack did admit came from him
While Daniel's gone, Jack begins to suspect who his own Secret Santa was, but after Daniel comes back he won't say one way or the other whether he remembers, so Jack will never know for sure. Nevertheless, the next Christmas Eve, just before quitting time, Jack hands Daniel a hotel-room key mummy-wrapped in tissue paper inside a neat cylinder of holly-leaf gift wrap twirled at the ends and tied with red ribbons. "This is from me," he says, wincing a little. Daniel looks up at him blankly; the team had agreed not to exchange gifts this year. "Dunno if it's something you ever wanted, but ... there it is. You know. If you ... want it." After Jack leaves, Daniel gets a delayed-send unsigned email that appears to have been routed through every anonymizing server in the Third World. It's the address of a hotel. The room number's on the gift wrap, and when Daniel goes to change out of his fatigues, there's an old watch in his locker, left unwound, the hands set to nine and twelve.
That gives him about fifteen minutes to get there. He leaves right away, palms sweating, heart pounding; he drives like a nut through blinding snow, and he's lucky he doesn't wipe out and kill himself, never mind getting pulled over. There's no time and he's too frazzled to pick up a gift for Jack, but when he arrives, babbling apologies for lateness and giftlessness, Jack assures him that he's all Jack ever really wanted for Christmas anyway.
In three hours, it'll be Christmas, but they decide not to wait to open their presents.