With the holidays coming up and all, I thought I’d start a thread about the Yankee Gift Exchange. It’s become a tradition in my office, because it’s so much fast-and-furious fun that if we organized a holiday party without it, people would get together and organize one anyway.
Just like with a regular gift exchange, everyone gets one present. But the fun part is that, along the way, people get to steal each other’s presents, with most of the presents changing hands a fair number of times. Here’s how it works:
Preliminaries: everyone buys a present for at most $X (we have a $10 limit), wraps it well enough to conceal the contents, and brings it to the party.
Basics: If there are n participants, the Yankee Gift Exchange has n rounds. (So if you’ve got 9 people involved, there are 9 rounds.) [ul]
[li] Each person starts one round. (We draw numbers out of a hat to see who starts which round.)[/li][li] Each round ends with someone opening a ‘new’ (previously unopened) present.[/li][li] Each round begins with someone either opening a new present (in which case that ends the round right then), or stealing a present someone else already has.[/li][li] If someone steals the present you’ve already got, then you can either steal someone else’s present, or open a new present (ending the round). [/li][li] But to keep it from going on forever, each present can only be stolen once in a round.[/li][/ul]
For example, a hypothetical Round 6:
Persons A, B, C, D, and E already have presents. Person F, who gets to start off Round 5, has already had a chance to see what presents A, B, C, D, and E have so far. If F likes one of those, he steals it. (I’ll come back to this.) If not, he picks a wrapped present from the pile, and unwraps it, ending the round.
So let’s say F steals B’s present. B then looks over what A, C, D, and E have. B decides she likes C’s present, and steals it. C looks over what A, D, and E have, steals E’s present. E looks at A’s and D’s presents, and decides to take a chance on what’s in the pile. E picks out a wrapped present, and unwraps it. End of round.
If you have ten or fifteen rounds of this, it starts off relatively simply, but escalates crazily as things go along. People check out each other’s presents during and between rounds, to see what they’d like to steal if they get the chance. One person will steal a present from another in one round, only to have it stolen back in the next, and then someone new will steal it the following round.
Like I said, everyone gets to start one round. It’s good to start a late round, because then you’re guaranteed to be able to steal good presents. But it’s also good to start an early round, because then you can participate in more rounds of stealing and counter-stealing. So there’s good things about each.
Anyone else have interesting kinds of gift exchanges?