Dirty Santa: A Fun Gift Exchange Game for Christmas Parties

Don't Worry, There's Nothing Adult About It - Your Kids Can Participate, Too

Every year groups of friends or family members get together for a holiday party. Obviously it would be expensive for everyone to buy everyone else at these parties a present so there are other options. One would be to not have any gifts, but then again, gifts make the party more fun! So you could do the Secret Santa exchanges where people draw names out of a hat, but what if you draw someone's name and have no idea what types of things they like for gifts? Here's another game that could help solve that problem.

It's referred to quite often as "Dirty Santa", don't worry though the reason it's called "dirty" is because you can take a gift someone has already opened. For this gift exchange tell everyone attending to bring a gift in a certain price range, we usually tell people $20-25 for the party I host for my friends. Also tell them not to make it gender or age specific (if you have a broad variety of ages). Once everyone arrives with their wrapped gift tell them to put them under the tree or on the gift table, make sure they didn't put their names on it.

To start the game put pieces of paper with the numbers of how many people are there (i.e. if there are 20 people puts papers with numbers 1 through 20 in the hat). Then let everyone draw a number. Their number indicates which "round" they start.

The person that goes first also usually gets an additional turn at the end which I'll explain later. The first person doesn't really have many options, they pick a present and open it. After that though the game gets more interesting. Starting with round 2 , it changes a little bit. At that point the person who starts the round has a couple options they can open a new present and then the round ends, or if they want they can take one of the presents that have already been opened. If that happens then the person that had their gift "stolen" from them has the option to open a new gift or steal an open gift. There are some rules that go with this though.