Everyone loves Christmas, it’s a time to be thankful for having the year passed by without much major downs in your life, to show gratitude for all the love and kindness that you have received throughout the year.

Celebration of this gratitude among family members, friends and colleagues take place in forms of parties where gathering and bonding is made of sumptuous spread of food, wide variety of wine, beer and other booze and exchange of gifts and presents.

One of the traditional and most played out gift exchange games is Dirty Santa gift exchange.  The game is easy to play which involves stealing of your fellow player’s gift, which you feel are the best Dirty Santa gifts.  The game is best played among a minimum of ten folks, so that stealing of presents are fun and engaging.

As there are different ways to play this Dirty Santa gift exchange, it is critical for you to set the ground rules right from the start, so that the players can source for the suitable gifts within the rules set.

There are three common ways to play the game, which we have listed down here for your consideration.

The first way is the guessing game.  As the name suggest, player can only guess the game based on the wrapped gift that they can see.  As the gift is all covered up with the wrapper, player can only guess if they prefer their fellow team-member’s gift and steal from them through the size and size of the exterior of the gift and feel of the gift.  This leaves a certain level of mystery which adds to the thrill of the game.

The second popular way to play the game, which is more popular among intimate settings for example among family team members, will be the gift tagging way, which you will tag the present with the name of the recipient that you are assigned to.  The other players will steal the gift if they feel that the gift bought for the particular recipient is something to their liking or not, or just for the thrill, to make fun and tease the particular recipient whom they are close to.

The last popular way is for the players to buy gifts from a particular place, for example a particular shopping mall, supermarket sports shop, novelty shop, theme shop or online place.  This choice of venue depends on the players preference or most frequently shopped area. Set a budget like buying Dirty Santa gifts under 20 so that all the recipients will eventually have something of similar monetary value.

Whichever way the organiser chooses to play the game is dependent on the demographics of the players, the relationship among the players and also the theme and other activity agenda of the party.  In some occasions, where there is a big group, the organiser may want to consider splitting the players to adults and children.

We hope you will consider one of the above three ways when organising the Dirty Santa gift Exchange.  One of the most important message to pass to your players is to let them know having fun is more important than the physical gift itself.