The Craziest Christmas Party Game - The Mad Santa Gift Exchange

A few years ago, my friends realized that our group had grown to an enormous size. While some of us could afford to consider buying Christmas gifts for everyone in the group, most of the people involved were college students, whose budget did not allow that sort of generosity. So the idea of the Mad Santa gift exchange was introduced.

The basic premise of this combination of a gift exchange and a party game is fairly simple. Everyone who wants to participate brings a wrapped gift that falls within a certain price range - $10-20 is usually a good range, though it can be scaled lower or higher depending on the group in question. All of the Mad Santa gifts are placed in a pile, and all participants are then randomly assigned numbers. Depending on the number of participants, you can do this in a number of ways. One year, we had few enough people playing that we could simply all draw cards from a single suit; last year we had 20 people playing, so we wrote out numbers on paper and drew those instead.

Then the madness begins. The person who was unfortunate enough to draw the lowest number chooses a gift out of the pile, and unwraps it. Then the second person has the option of either taking the first person's already unwrapped gift, or unwrapping a new present of their own. If someone's already unwrapped gift is taken from them, they have the option of taking someone else's already unwrapped gift, or returning to the pile for a new gift. This proceeds until all of the numbers have come up, all the presents have been unwrapped, and all of the stealing has been completed. Our group has added a house rule to this game, stating that in any given "round" of action, you can only have a gift stolen from you once - once someone has taken whatever you had at the beginning of the round, the next thing you pick up is yours till the next round.