White elephant gift exchange lessons learned

December 20, 2005

I’m currently part of three different teams at the moment at my day job. As such, I’ve been to three different holiday get-togethers for the various teams. One was a late afternoon happy hour/potluck; one was a lunch at a nice restaurant; and another was a late afternoon appetizer/dessert at a nice place that specializes in desserts.

At two of the get-togethers, we took part in the traditional white elephant/gag gift exchange game. For the most part, I like the game. However, how you define the rules up front has a lot to do with the success of the game and how many people will walk away upset.

- The first rule is that the person who’s turn it is gets to either open a present from the pile or they can steal an opened present from someone else.
-The next rule you should have is that each present can only be stolen three times. This means that four people will have had it in their posession: the opener and then three stealers. This is a good rule to put in place to keep games from going on ad infinitum .
- Along with the three steals limit, there should be a ‘no stealbacks’ rule. For most groups this is an unspoken rule because it harkens back to the ‘no tagbacks’ rule from when we were kids. But it never hurts to verbalize it because it really sucks to see two people use up the three steals limit on one gift in rapid succession.
- Finally, when you get to the end, that’s it! The first person is screwed. Sorry. None of this, ‘First person gets a chance to steal’ crap. They already have a present. They had the pick of all the presents up there. Hopefully they got something worth stealing which then gave them additional chances to open another or steal from someone else. As it is, if they can steal at the end, then what happens to that victim? They get stuck with what the first person had? Everybody else had a fair chance to choose their gift, except that person. Seems like crap to me.

My second gift exchange (with the first person can choose rule) found the victim with the present they brought, which isn’t fair. So they were given a chance to choose. Of course, the new victim wanted a chance to choose, etc. The game went on for another five to ten minutes like that with people getting quite irked because that just isn’t the way it is supposed to be played.

The first gift exchange I took part in where the first person was screwed ended up much better. Well, the first person wasn’t all that happy because they got stuck with a crappy present that no one else wanted to steal, but rather one person than half the group!

Shopping suggestions: You can spend a lot of time trying to come up with the perfect gift, but I think the best thing to do is to visit your local drug store or grocery store and visit their gift/crap aisle. There is all sorts of stuff there that goes over quite well for these things. Stuff you would never buy except for white elephant gift exchanges.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General 

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