A gift exchange with white elephants is a popular Christmas event where people compete to leave with the best gift. Musical gifts work when there are several people who are going to exchange gifts. You need music (Christmas carols would be a nice touch), all the gifts ready and a person to play the music to start. When it comes to playing the gift exchange game Hot Bow, you need music, a person designated to perform the music, and a big red ribbon.
Another fun idea for exchanging gifts can be guessing the gift. For this gift exchange, you need the gifter to create 5 to 6 clues about the type of gift inside. You want the tracks to be a bit challenging. Ask participants to open their gifts one at a time.
After opening each gift, ask the person to guess who their secret Santa is. Those who guess correctly win a small prize, such as a bottle of lotion or a candle. For Christians, the gifts given at Christmas are a symbol of the homages that the Three Wise Men paid to the baby Jesus after his birth during the history of the Nativity. Each person starts with a gift in their hands, and gifts are passed back and forth as each question is answered.
Economist Joel Waldfogel noted that, due to the mismatch between what the gifted value the gift and the value paid by the giver, gifts lose between a tenth and a third of their value; he calls it the loss of Christmas dead weight. You can also talk about your gifts in advance, agree on the topic of the gift, or adopt a tradition from another country to make gift-giving more enjoyable. At a White Elephant gift exchange, each participant brings a wrapped, unmarked gift and places it in a designated area. Part of the fun is watching players try to hide their “good gifts” or encourage them to take their “bad gifts”.
You can configure it so that everyone has a particular person to give a personalized gift to, or so that each one makes a universal item that can be given to anyone. At the party, ask everyone to place their gift wrapped for their matches under the tree, with the top of the gift tag full but the top part blank. Therefore, in its basic form, the game asks people to bring “joke gifts” or gifts that they received that are of no use to them. Keep in mind in the party invitation that everyone must bring a wrapped gift and set a dollar limit for the gift.
Above all, you'll want to have a good combination of gifts, some desirable and others in the category of “undesirable gifts” or as a joke. Before the Internet came to light, going to the center of a city with the mission of buying Christmas gifts was an annual event, and people would have to get all their gifts on these trips or face new expeditions at a later date. If none of the above ideas surprise you, consider sending the gift recipient on a treasure hunt for their big surprise, whether you're sending it around town or just inside your house, using clues and perhaps including one or two smaller gifts along the way. As subsequent players take their turn, select a new gift, or take away any already opened gift from any of the other players.
The first person to go opens the gift they chose and the next person has the option to steal the gift from the previous person (in which case that person would have to choose another one) or select a new one. Swedish children also believe in an alternative to give Santa Claus the jultomten, a small gnome with a red cap that hides under the floorboards or in the attic until Christmas Eve, when he goes out to hand out gifts to children. .
