Christmas has come and gone, and this year has to rate as one of the best ever in my family!  For the weeks leading up to the day itself as well as the 6 family get-togethers (with one still yet to come) within three days, my holiday was busy and exhausting, but still a total blast!  And one of the things that made the gatherings even better was how we've incororated a few games into the very nature of our Christmas celebrations.  That's why I want to take a few moments here to share this with the gaming world, so that you can see if these activities might be able to fit into your Christmas tradtions as well.

Gift Wrapping Gone BAD!!!!

The first is a friendly competition that has slowly developed between my brother-in-law Kevin and his younger cousin Rebecca.  Every year at my wife's grandparent's get-together on Christmas Eve, the main attraction is to see how Rebecca and Kevin have wrapped each other's gifts.  It all started when they were just kids and, since presents were always opened from youngest to oldest, Rebecca would take as long as she could to keep Kevin (the next youngest) waiting.  Then one year, she also took the additional step to wrap each individual drill bit from a set she was giving him in a little box of its own, sealed firmly with layers of duct tape.  That was the point from which all escalation began, but as they have grown older and more ideas have been used, the creativity and difficulty have risen dramatically.  

In general, the presents themselves tend to be gift certificates or gift cards, including everything from a handful of McDonald's Dollars early on to Amazon and Best Buy gift cards in the last several years.  Some of the "wrapping" highlights of this epic struggle include the gift being sealed in: concrete, pipe-bomb looking things (both PVC and metal on different years), ice, chocolate pudding, a block of wood, and being buried in the garden (after a lengthy scavenger hunt involving several small puzzles and riddles).  Usually, tools have to be brought to get into the presents, including: wood saws, hacksaws, sledgehammers, a shovel, knives, scissors, a cutting torch, a spoon, an ice pick, and on one particularly interesting occurrence, a 'tater gun.  Last year, as on a surprising number of cases in the past, both Kevin and Rebecca had a very similar idea.  Rebecca buried Kevin's present in a huge bag of packing peanuts (that was almost as big as he was) while Kevin buried hers in a large box of packing peanuts.  My wife Gwen, however, also gave Kevin the idea to place the present (cash in this case) into some of a plethora of medicine bottles (collected by throughout the entire year previous by our whole family) buried in the peanuts.  Many of the other bottles would also contain some item or other (mostly worthless rocks or pennies) and would be wrapped in the ubiquitous duct tape just to keep her honest and needing to open all the bottles just to make sure she would open them all. 

This "granularity" idea carried right over to this year, which once again saw an uncanny similarity between the presents.  All year long, Rebecca and her family collected as many little "gift-card-shaped" plastic cards as they could.  Things like the fake credit cards you get in the mail, expired gift cards, plastic coupons (like our favorite, the "free panty" from Victoria's Secret), and other similar stuff.  Anyway, she took these 100+ cards and sealed them all individually in their own envelope, which Kevin then had to spend forever opening to find the "real" gift card.  Rebecca actually inserted the "real" envelope into the center of the bundle, but Kevin mixed them all up when he opened the gift, and it turned out to be in the very last envelope.  It was absolutlely hillarious... and a little exhausting just to watch.  

Kevin, meanwhile (using another of my wife's ideas), had printed out an Amazon.com gift certificate and inserted it into one of three reams of paper, along with 90 copies of funny pictures of hiumself, Rebecca, and the two of them from last year (the one above).  He then, of course, duct-taped the whole thing together and slapped a bow on it.  Kevin was a little too greedy, however.  Instead of inserting it somewhere in the middle ream, he instead placed it second from the bottom of the whole bundle.  When applying the duct tape, of course, he lost his bearings on up and down and ended up putting the bow on the wrong side.  Rebecca therefore started from the bottom and, our of the 1650 pieces of paper she might have needed to sift through, the certificate was the second one she came to.  Also hillarious, though a bit of a let-down.  

So, what you all need to do is just go out and pick a gift-wrapping fight with someone you love.  It will soon become the highlight of your family gathering!

Good ole' Dirty Santa

The gold standard for Christmas games has got to be the Dirty Santa game.  Just in case you don't have a clue about this (or call it something different), I'll describe the basic rules to you.  Everybody that is going to participate brings a wrapped present, usually of a set value and ideally unisex in nature (nothing's worse as a dude than getting an ugly pocketbook or some smelly lotion that no one else wants).  Numbers are then drawn to determine the order in which people open presents.  On your turn, you can either open an unopened present or (and here's the dirty part) take a previously-opened present from somebody else.  Immediate take-backs (from the person who just stole your gift) are, of course, not allowed.  Each round, someone will eventually open a new gift, and then the next number gets their turn.  In most all cases, since getting number 1 would otherwise really suck, the first person to go also gets to just exchange presents with anyone else at the end of the game, with no recourse at all for the stolen-from person.  

Now, some people also add various other rules to these basic ones as well.  The most common is the "retire after three exchanges" rule, where a present is retired from the game (and therefore no longer may be stolen) after it has changed hands three times.  This certainly can shorten the game, but in my estimation that is not a good thing, so I don't like it.

Three years ago, I broke the game by realizing that if Gwen and I worked as a team we could always protect any particular gift we wanted.  If someone stole my gift that I liked, I could just steal Gwen's gift and she could steal back whatever was stolen from me (so we ended up with the same two gifts).  Therefore, we added a rule that no particular gift may change hands more than once per round (until a new gift has been opened).  It doesn't prevent much of the dirtiness, however, because it can still be stolen in as many future rounds as possible.

Now, I've tried to insert this little gem of a game into as many gatherings as I can, both at work, at church, and in our family.  It works better with some groups than others (usually better with people who are comfortable with each other and who like to get a little "dirty").  It is a great alternative if you're tired of all the time and expense of buying presents for every single person, and want to just have a good time together at Christmas.  Usually, the best way to play is to bring something that you really want to take home, thus ensuring that there's at least one present you think is fighting for.   

Anyway, my case in point is the Christmas Eve family get-together at my Aunt Alice's.  We've been playing Dirty Santa there for around 12-15 years or so, and we are always pushing the limits of how dirty we can be year after year!  This year, there were 15 people involved in the game, ranging in age from 12 to 70+.  Most of us have known each other forever, but my cousin Will also brought his girlfriend for her second straight year of dirty, Christmas fun!

Now this was the gathering where Gwen and I broke the game three years ago.  There were some really cute little juice glasses with pictures of cats on them up for grabs, and we used the little trick I discovered to keep them in our family any time someone would attempt to take them from us.  Of course, Will and his sister Ellen got back at us when they literally stole them (as in, after the game was over they snuck over to the box and committed an actual act of theft by taking out a couple of glasses) from us.  What's bad is that we didn't even notice until Will called us up a few days later and asked how we liked the glasses.  It was all in good fun, of course, and we now have the complete set in our cabinet. 

This year, things were down and dirty from the get-go, with chain reactions of gift stealing from the second round on.  My aunt Rachel, the oldest of the group, has a very distinct strategy of, once she gets a gift she likes, putting it back in the box and setting it behind her, getting very quiet and trying to avoid notice for the rest of the game.  On the other side of that coin is my 12-year old nephew Peter, who regularly turns into a high-pressre pitch man when holding presents he doesn't care for (which I can't blame him for, since I doubt that he really needed a set of yellow towels or a cookbook rack).  Once he got the chocolate fondue fountain (which was far more to his liking), he did his best impression of Rachel, which prompted me to mercilessly taunt him with theft every time I had the opportunity to choose a gift.   

As is my regular practice, I stole whatever gift Will was holding every chance I got, and we ended up trading one of those little lights that you strap to your forehead (I think they call it a "head light") back and forth for most of the game.  Meanwhile, Will's girlfriend had the number 15 (the second best number in the game behind #1), and was frequently heard to exclaim, "I reeeeally like that!" every time a new present was opened.  She ended up with a "Clapper" at the end of the game, which pleased her quite a bit until Will made some reference to being able to turn her mouth off with a well-timed clap or two (which was reeeeally dirty!)

We had a great time, and ended up the night trying to think up some ways to make it even dirtier next year.  So, if any of you out there have any additional rules that you use or can think of some way to make it even better, please list them here.  Let's work together to make Christmas the dirtiest holiday of them all!!!