Secret Santa is a gift exchange party game in which players are randomly assigned a person to gift a present!  It’s ideal for the holiday season — especially Christmas.

This party game works best when there are at least ten players.

Setup for the Secret Santa Gift Exchange

This party game requires one organizer to prepare a list of all the players and to have a way to randomize names and assign each person to a random other person.  You can write names on cards and then randomly hand them out, or you can use online methods to determine who gets assigned to who.

We recommend that you set a price limit — for example, something small like $5 or $10 — so that the gifts are of similar quality and that people don’t go overboard.

Playing the Secret Santa Gift Exchange

There are two main ways to play Secret Santa — to keep the gift exchange a true secret forever, or to have people guess who their Secret Santa is! At a party, you can have each person take a guess and have everyone reveal whether or not it is truly them!

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