We do the pull the name from that hat kinda thing but with a twist. We add a dollar amount maximum, in our situation it’s $50.
We gift recipients give a list of items we might like that could total the $50, be that one gift or a combo of many if desired gift giving person wants to go that route.
The bummer thing is, gift certificates seemed to be the norm this year after I was bitched at last year for stating I only wanted gift certificates. This year though I went through two of my favorite catalogs and gave my gift giver a lot of ideas to choose from. I think I came up with about 15 ideas so by Christmas it will be a surprise. I still have the list of wants so I can order, later, those things I really wanted but didn’t get.
Well, this solution wouldn’t work for the OP, but in case anyone else is in need of ideas, we dispensed with the gifts (on my side of the family) last year and planned a trip together. Since we live over 700 miles away from my family, we generally fly anyway. By the time you ship our gifts there, and ship the ones we get home, it just gets ridiculous. So now we buy one small gift for each of the kids. The adults (my sister and I, our husbands, plus my parents) don’t do gifts. Last year we met up in DC (all of us flying, though from different places) and had a wonderful 5 days there. This year they’re coming to MI just to give us a break from flying (I’ve flown at Christmas for the last 15 rows straight!!!) In the future we may go to Florida or South Carolina or San Antonio or who knows where.
As for travel-sized soaps from hotel… my father traditionally uses these as stocking stuffers. To be obnoxious, he likes to print grossly-inflated “price stickers” which he places on the travel items and then pretends to be embarrassed that he didn’t get the tags off. The funny thing is, I told this story to my boss’ boss when we were traveling together (I was making off with the hotel shampoo) and she found it so funny, she often saves her hotel toiletries for me. This year she brought me all these cool products from a resort in Barcelona. I may not give them to my dad after all.
In my office, we do the “cutthroat Christmas” that others have described (gifts aren’t designated and can be swiped). But we pick a theme, like “food” or “Videos” or “Books” or “gadgets.” Last year we went with “White” which meant people gave everything from white wine to white chocolate godivas to Barry White albums.
My family consists of couples and a few kids. For a few years we drew names as couples (i.e., bob and susie get john and martha), but that got boring pretty quickly. Now, we draw names by individual at Thanksgiving to allow us all to face the madding xmas rush with “last-minute” cheer.
My favorite Christmas was when we drew names and made a contribution to the favorite charity of whomever we drew. I always wished I had the nerve to ask my folks (who are fanatically right wing) to donate to NARAL or the ACLU or some other worthwhile group, but I never had the nerve.
My husbands family simply buys gifts for who they want to give gifts to, there is a cursory name drawing, but no one really sticks to it and feelings get hurt.
I have a pretty small immediate family but lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Within my immediate family - mom, dad, sister, both grandmothers and my father’s mentally handicapped brother - everybody gives everybody else a present. You get out to the cousins and aunts and uncles, it’s just if you find something you think they’d like. Most of my cousins are younger than I am so I try to give each of them a little something, even if it’s just a holiday lip gloss for the girls and a toy from the dollar store for the boys. Sometimes my whole family will give one gift to one of their whole families, or vice versa, like the time my family got together with my grandmother and one of my aunts’ families to buy another aunts’ family all plane tickets to come up to New York to visit us in the spring from their home in Virginia. There isn’t really a sense of obligation; if you find something nice and you want to give a present, you do so, and if not, then you don’t, no hard feelings on anyone’s part.
I always give my friends presents. I don’t make friends easily and the friends I do have, I consider as close as my immediate family or closer.
I find it to be lots of fun to look for the perfect thing to please everyone. It’s even more fun to try to do it on a budget - it’s more creative that way.
The gift exchanges the way Gunslinger describes 'em would not be fun for me at all. I don’t like buying impersonal gifts and I would just take the first thing I saw off the pile and keep it unless somebody else wanted it, because I wouldn’t want to take something somebody else had their heart set on.
Like racinchikki, I have a small immediate family but a large and growing extended family. Most of the extended family lives in the same city, so we’ve always gotten together on Christmas afternoon and hung out until late Christmas night. After going through many arrangements, including drawing names out of a hat, buying for kids only, and doing impersonal exchanges, we’ve finally arrived at a solution that works well for everyone: food.
Each main family unit (married couples & their children, and unmarried children living on their own) makes some kind of food package for every other family unit. It’s usually, but not exclusively, stuff that can be stored for a long time and thus enjoyed leisurely.
Items shared have been:
Homemade soaps with food themes (cinnamon bath oil, citrus and mint-scented soaps, etc.)
Sourdough bread starter, plus one homemade loaf and smoked salmon, all from Alaska
Rolls and a kitf or making 3-bean soup
Homemade Frango mints
Marzipan and chocolate spread with shortcake
Different colors of popcorn kernels (yellow, red, blue) layered in a glass jar
There’s lots of good stuff, and the kids help make everything. I look forward to it every year.
My husband’s family are all well-off and it was getting to the point where we were just exchanging gift certificates anyway. So a few years ago we decided to dispense with the gift exchange for the adults entirely. Instead we buy gifts for local children through the “giving tree” program at church. (A tree is decorated with ornaments that include the first name, age, and sex of a child. You take an ornament and return it the following week taped to a wrapped gift.)
No gifts at Christmas? Yup. And let me tell you, it has really taken the stress off the day. The highlight of the day is visiting with friends and family.
Well me blood family for some reason has chosen to make me in charge of deciding how to handle Christmas gift exchange. Don’t ask me why it came to me, I have no idea. I used to keep a list and I set who bought for whom and rotated the list every year. Then one of my siblings got tired of everyone making fun of him for being late or having FedEx deliver on Christmas day. So he and his wife are out. Also last year my sisters were pissed at each other so I had to make sure they didn’t have each other. Now that we are all spread out across the country each sibling and spouse have another sibling and their spouse so shipping is easier.
When we started trading names it was because there were too many of us so the IDEA WAS that instead of getting ten 15-20 dollar gifts we get one 50 -75 dollar gift. But some of my siblings seem to have forgotten this idea over the years. (I wonder how I can remind them?)
Now my In-Laws are really strange. We spend Christmas there because they are closer and well, read on.
Christmas morning begins with the youngest kid, who is now 20 years old waking up first at about 5 am and going into the oldest kid (now my wife) and getting into be with us!?! Then we wait for a little while. We get a phone call from the oldest kid, who lives far away, and chat with them in the bed. We can’t go downstairs yet. About 6:30 dad-in-law goes down with much grumbling to make coffee and a fire and to check and see that Santa’s been there. Now all the kids (that’s includes 37 year old me) wait at the top of the stairs and we finally wake up the other sister who gets up at the crack of dawn every day of the year except Christmas when she is cranky in the morning.
Now mom appears and she has done her hair and makeup and she takes a photo of all the kids at the top of the stairs and then we can go down. It is now about 7 o’clock.
Now everybody has a stocking with about 10 to 15 items in it. Recently it was decided that everyone would open a stocking at the same time instead of taking turns. After the stockings (did you see any mention of stockings in my family? No? We NEVER did stockings!) we move onto the gifts. There are gifts from each other, Santa, and the girls get gifts from ‘their secret admirer’. Also the youngest (the 20 year old) has a cabbage patch doll. The doll gets stuff as well. Usually a new outfit or some batteries or something that compliments his owners gifts. So one by one we open the gifts with each person fetching a gift for the person who is the least older than them.
So when we finish at about NOON. We shower and dress and go over to a celebration with the Aunts and Uncles!
But let me tell you about a girl I used to date.
At her house it is a Christmas tradition to play Bombadier.
How do you play Bombadier?
Well you place a jar in the center of the room on the floor. Then at the edge of the room you pinch a quarter and walk over to the jar and stand above it and try to drop the quarter in. Oh you pinch the quarter with your ass checks.
