Swap or auction? Office gifting can be fun

Christmas gift swaps in the workplace can be a fun way to bond with coworkers. Here are five themes for Christmas gift swaps at work:

1. The ever-popular Secret Santa swap: This exchange pairs employees anonymously and usually has a monetary limit. To make this a little more fun, employees can leave hints as to who they are to encourage the recipients to try and figure out who their Secret Santa was.

2. Holiday Trivia: With a holiday trivia-themed swap, coworkers get to pick a gift from a pile for answering a trivia question correctly. Choosing a gift takes them out of the competition. The moderator chooses last, either taking the last gift from the pile, or by stealing another employee’s treasure and replacing it with the final wrapped gift.

3. Gift Guess: In this type of exchange, everyone wraps a random gift in a way that disguises the source and, of course, what the gift is. Each employee holds up their gift as others guess what it is. The coworker who guesses what that mystery gift is gets the gift.

4. Gift Auction: As in many of these themes, competition can bring a little more energy and fun to a gift swap. Each employee brings a gift to display in the office, and every participating employee has a certain amount of points to bid. At auction time, as each gift is presented, coworkers bid on the items, and the top bids take home the prize. When all prizes are claimed and all employees are out of points, the auction is over.

5. Musical Gifts: This is an adult version of musical chairs, with gifts. You can do this with a few gifts at a time, to lengthen the game. Every participating employee brings in a wrapped gift and when it’s time to exchange, everyone sits in a circle and passes gifts to the left. When the music stops, the person holding a gift gets it, then leaves the circle and it begins again, with another round of gifts and the remaining employees. This continues until all gifts have been distributed.