White Elephant Gift Exchange Rules

A White Elephant Gift Exchange is a popular Christmas event where people vie to walk away with the best present. It also goes by Yankee Swap, Dirty Santa, and a plethora of other names. The White Elephant game is played by a lot of different rulesets – some dead simple and others confusingly elaborate.

We will keep ours simple. Here are the basic rules:

1. Each player brings one basket related gift in a brown paper bag and places it the gift table. You do not need to enclose a card.
   
2. Each member will draw a number from a basket.
   
3. To make things easier, everyone should sit in the order in which they will take their turns
   and get to know their neighbor for the night.
   
4. The first player selects a gift from the gift table and opens it, making sure that everyone can see the gift!
   
5. The following players can choose to either pick an unwrapped gift from the gift table or steal a previous player’s gift. Anyone who gets their gift stolen in this way can do the same – choose a new gift or steal from someone else.
   

To keep things moving along, there are a couple of limits on gift swapping:

• A present can only be stolen once per turn, which means players who have a gift stolen from them have to wait to get it back.
  
• After three swaps, the turn automatically comes to an end (otherwise things could drag on for a long time).
  

6. After all players have had a turn, the first player gets a chance to swap the gift she is holding for any other opened gift.