Fun and Creative White Elephant Gift Ideas for the Holiday Season!

I have been a part of quite a few white elephant gift giving parties and I can tell you from experience that this is an extremely fun way to celebrate the tradition of giving! White elephant gifts will spice up any holiday party! A quick review of how to play will give us ideas forgifts!

There are two ways of going about this: New and Used. I have done both. Both are great in their own right. One tends to be funnier than the other and, depending on your crowd, or the number of people participating, you may want to do both, for different sets of people.

Now, as with type of gift, there are many ways to play. I'll explain the general rules of play and apply different scenarios to each.

Let's start with USED. I took part in a very funny white elephant party when I was in school. My classmates and I each went home and rifled through our toys and things and found something that would make a unique and memorable gift. Some of spent a dollar or two at the local dollar store, but for the most part, the gifts we gave were one-of-a-kind items that we had owned.

So, there were 25 of us playing.Each of us wrapped our gift before arriving at the party. We sat in a large circle and each held our gift in our laps. (Here iswhere technique changes according to size of party!) We began at one side of the circle andmade ourway around the group. The first person, not wanting his owngift, placed it in the middle of the circle and tooksomeone else's gift. He could open it or leave it wrapped, it didn't matter, but he wasn't safe yeteither! The second person could either take the gift from themiddle of the circle, or take agift from someone else in the group - including Number One! If this happens, Number One can take another person'sgift.THIS CAN ONLY HAPPEN ONE TIME! Otherwise, the game maynever end!

Asecond way of playing is to gatherall of the giftstogether on a table,then give each person a number. In numeric order, choose a gift from the pile, unwrap it and go to the next person. Taking another person'sgift is okay here too, butthe person who loses theirgift mustchoose another from the pile (or if gifts have already been opened, takesomeone else's).