How to Plan Games for a Christmas Party

The annual home or office Christmas party can be a lot of fun for guests, but stressful for hosts. Many holiday-weary party planners are in need of simple ways to plan games for these events to avoid more stress. Here are some tips on party-game planning that will help you entertain after just a little stress-free preparation.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Santa photo
• Internet access for more ideas
• Candy canes
• Miscellaneous Christmas items to hide

Use Short Games as Ice Breakers

1. Use candy canes to make mingling easy and comfortable. When your guests arrive, hand them half of a candy cane. Throughout the evening, they must search for the other half of their cane and introduce themselves to the person holding it.

2. Sing your favorite Christmas carol as a group. Each time a word is missed or lyric sung incorrectly, the guilty party has to stop singing. Whoever is left singing alone is the winner.

3. Conduct a "Christmas purse search." Whoever has the most Christmas-related items in her purse wins a door prize.

Plan Games That Last Through the Evening

4. Turn a traditional scavenger hunt into a Christmas hunt. Hide Christmas items throughout your home and divide your guests into teams. Each team will be given a list of items to find, and the one that finds them all first wins.

5. Hand one of your guests a small picture of Santa Claus, and ask him to hide it in his pocket. Once all the guests are present, inform them that Santa is actually at the party and they have to guess who he is by the end of the party. The winner will be the person who unravels the secret Santa first. (Hint: each person only receives one guess!)

Tips & Warnings

• Not everyone is into games, especially at Christmas parties. To help get everyone involved, be sure to inform your guests ahead of time that there will be games played, so that they can prepare themselves mentally to join in the fun! For more party ideas, check out Martha Stewart's website (see Resources below).
• Use appetizers, drinks and dinner to break up the game play if you want to create a sense of variety in your party. You never want to force guests to sit for hours on end playing games.
• Keep in mind that not all of your guests may celebrate Christmas. To incorporate all seasonal holidays into your party, stay away from Santa-related or religious-based themes in a mixed crowd.

Resources

• Visit Martha Stewart online to plan more party games