12 Fun Christmas Party Games and Gift Exchange Ideas

Most people have traditions they follow throughout the holidays, including Christmas traditions. You can inject a bit of novelty into your celebration to make new traditions. Gathering with friends and family is always fun, but you can amp it up by adding Christmas party games. Not everyone has the same taste, so pick a couple of games that cater to the diverse tastes of your guests. Have fun, and let EpochWriter help make your Christmas party a memorable one!

Create your own charades game by writing Christmas-related words and phrases on cards for players to act out.

Create trivia cards based on popular Christmas movies. Add more fun by throwing in some trivia about all those Christmas specials you watched as a kid.

You can still exchange gifts even when people don't have a lot of money to spend on relatives and friends. Put all participants' names in a hat and have everyone draw a name. Keep the names secret! Each person buys or makes a small gift for the person's name they chose.

​Find plain ornaments to decorate. A few days before the party, make sure everyone who is coming has an ornament. Have them decorate the ornament and bring it to the Christmas party. Set them up on a table with a voting tally sheet for each ornament. As the evening progresses, make sure everyone votes for the ornament they like best – they can't vote for their own! Give out a prize for the best, second-best and third-best.

Create a list of holiday-themed items for your guests to find. If you really want to make it challenging, give out the list a few days before the party and have the guests find the items. If they can't bring the object with them, they should take a photo of the item to show where they found it. The photo should show enough of the background so you can see where the person found the item.

Create and print Christmas-themed bingo cards. You can just play several games for small prizes or make a tournament-style game where winners get small prizes, and the winner of the tournament gets a bigger prize.

​You can do this one of two ways:

• Make enough Christmas cookies for each guest to decorate two cookies.
• Announce the Christmas cookie decorating contest and have people make their own cookies and bring the best-decorated cookie to the party. Set up voting sheets where people can mark their vote. At the end of the party, whoever gets the most votes wins a prize. People can't vote for their own cookie. 

This game goes by many names, including the white elephant gift exchange. This is perfect when you have a large crowd, or many of your guests can't afford to buy a gift for every relative. The game has several variations. You can find the rules and variations here.  

Set up a holiday backdrop and add props so people can take holiday photos of each other.

For this game, you'll need several hundred feet of plastic wrap. You can use the cheap plastic wrap from the dollar store for this. The center of the ball should have a big prize, such as a gift card or a bill that is worth more than any of the small gifts inside.

Wrap the "big money" gift (it can be as little as $5) in the center with several layers of plastic wrap. Continue wrapping and putting small gifts, such as candy, small bills, baseball caps, puzzle books, small samples of self-care items, pens, and anything else you can think of in the ball, with several layers of plastic wrap between gifts. The gifts should be on all sides of the ball so it stays round.

Have everyone sit around a table or in a circle on the floor. Choose who starts by seeing who rolls doubles first. The game moves from right to left. The person who goes first keeps the die. The person to that person's left gets the ball. The person with the ball unwraps layers of plastic wrap until the person rolling the die rolls doubles.

As soon as the person rolling gets doubles, the person with the ball passes it to the left, and the person with the die passes them to the left. The second person unwraps until the second roller rolls doubles. The game keeps going until someone gets the last prize (the first one you put in). 

Number several non-breakable ornaments. Wrap the same number of small gifts as you have ornaments and number them. You should have an equal number of ornaments and gifts. Tape off a throwing line. Your guests line up and take turns throwing a ring onto an ornament. If the ornament stays in the ring, the thrower keeps the ornament and picks the gift with the corresponding number.

​For this game, you will need a long table, the same number of solo cups and gifts, and a way to identify the gifts and cups. The wrapped gifts can be small gifts, cash, a slip of paper with a service you will provide (e.g., doing a child's chores for one day or cooking dinner for a relative or friend), or nothing.

You can use numbers or colors or even wrap a solo cup with the same pattern of wrapping paper as the gift. Tape the lip of the solo cup so it's even with the edge of the table. The cups should hang from the edge.

Line the two long edges of the table with the gifts. Each person takes a turn rolling a ping pong ball, small dog toy ball, or golf ball the long way down the table. Whichever cup the ball lands in is the gift the person gets.