There are a variety of Minute to Win It style, gift exchange, and active games to play at Christmas parties that are appropriate for large groups.
When you host any kind of party, you need to do some planning and preparation leading up to this party to ensure that it turns out to be a success.
This includes scheduling the date and inviting your guests, as well as organising the food, refreshments, and decorations to ensure that all of these elements suit the theme and the mood of the party.
All of these elements may seem overwhelming but planning for a big party like a Christmas party can have many fun and exciting moments too.
This is a festive time of year and finding appropriate decorations, invitations, food and beverages to match the occasion will not be difficult.
In order to ensure that your party is truly enjoyable to all of your guests, it is often a good idea to include party games as a form of entertainment.
Christmas party games range from Minute to Win It-style games and gift exchange games, to active games that can all be suitable for large groups.
What goes into planning a successful party?
Parties can be great fun for the hosts and invited guests. However, whether you are just throwing a party for close family and friends or for a larger group of people, there is a significant amount of planning and preparation that goes into making this kind of event a success.
The planning and preparation stage of a party often starts months before the actual party takes place.
This is especially true for parties that will happen at busy times of the year, like Christmas parties, Halloween parties, and New Year’s parties, as the hosts need to ensure that venues, caterers, and guests can book out the date of the party well in advance.
Besides the scheduling and the guest list, hosts also need to make a series of decisions to ensure that their party is a success.
This includes deciding whether the party will be hosted at a venue or at the host’s home, whether the food will be provided by a catering company or homemade and what kind of food and beverages will be served at the party, as well as how much of it must be provided.
Incorporating a theme, entertainment, and party favours for your guests to take home can also be a great way to ensure that the guests are entertained, that they have fun during the party, and that the entire event ends up being a great success to everyone who attended it.
Christmas party games for large groups
Although it may seem complicated and stressful to plan a party when you realise all of the arrangements, planning, and logistical decisions that go into organising a successful party, the important thing to keep in mind is that the goal of the party is for everyone to socialise and enjoy themselves.
Regardless of whether you are planning your Christmas party for a large group of family and friends, colleagues, or virtual strangers, a big part of what makes a Christmas party so much fun to host and attend is that most people will be in a festive mood.
This makes planning and executing all of the usual party-hosting duties much more enjoyable and less stressful for you.
When people are hosting Christmas parties, many hosts are uncertain whether many people will show up for the party, since it is such a busy time of the year and invited guests may have other family obligations to attend to.
However, the best way to ensure that your guests are well-prepared for your Christmas party and that they can book out the date well in advance is to make sure that you send out invitations well before the Christmas season starts.
A convenient way to do this is to use ready-made invitations, like these Holly Jolly Snowman ones, these Plaid ones, or these foliage-themed invitations.
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This will save you the time and effort of having to design and print the invitations yourself and it will help you to get them to your guests well in advance.
Although the food and beverage items for a Christmas party are always a big part of what will entice guests to attend the party, the duty of decorating the party venue can be the most fun for the host.
Christmas decorations for a Christmas party come in a vast range of different shapes, sizes, and intensities and they can range from understated garlands to full decoration kits with balloon arches, curtains, and characters.
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Another part of what can make Christmas parties so much fun for hosts and guests is the different sources of entertainment at the party. Games can be a great way to draw a large group of people together and to lift the mood of the entire event.
If you do decide to include games in your Christmas party planning, it is crucial to ensure that these games share the same Christmas spirit as the décor, food, and beverages and that the games are appropriate for the number of guests that will be attending the party.
In order to make it easier for you to decide which party games you want to play at your Christmas party, it is often simpler to split the games into a few categories, such as:
- Minute to Win It style Christmas party games
- Gift exchange Christmas party games
- Active Christmas party games
You can then choose one category or a few games from each category for your party, depending on what suits your party schedule and your guests the best.
Minute to Win It-style Christmas party games
Minute to Win It-style party games have been around for a long time, and they are an excellent choice for large Christmas parties that have guests that fall into a variety of age categories.
These Minute to Win It games are easy to understand, and they can be completed, as the name suggests, in about a minute.
This ensures that although all of the guests at your Christmas party will have the opportunity to participate in the fun, the games will not take over the entire party.
Some of the most popular Minute to Win It-style Christmas party games for large groups are:
Jingle in the trunk
| Description | The guest who can shake all of the jingle bells of ornaments out of the tissue box around their waist first, wins | ||||
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| Available on Amazon |
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Balloon stomp
| Description | Tie an inflated balloon to each guest’s ankle. All the guests then try to pop the other guests’ balloons while keeping their own intact. The last guest whose balloon remains intact, wins | ||
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| Available on Amazon |
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| Buy it | Buy it | Buy it | |
Decorate the Christmas tree
| Description | Guests are divided into groups and each group is given the same supplies. The group must nominate one guest and decorate that guest with the supplies they have been given in one minute. Then the host decides which “Christmas tree” wins | |||
| What you will need | Streamers, garlands, tinsel, ornaments, and more | |||
| Available on Amazon |
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| Buy it | Buy it | Buy it | Buy it | |
Gift exchange Christmas party games
Exchanging gifts on Christmas is a long-standing tradition and this can become fun entertainment at a Christmas party. Doing a “White Elephant” gift exchange requires that you instruct each of your guests to bring a small gift with them when they attend the Christmas party.
However, to make the gift exchange more fun, you can always purchase a gift exchange game kit, like this 90Shine one which includes instruction cards and dice to inform players of how they should swap gifts or this Big Dot of Happiness game that has scratch cards, and that works in the same way.
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| Buy it on Amazon | Buy it on Amazon |
Active Christmas party games
Oven mitts or saran-wrap snowball game
| Description | The host will wrap small gifts and prizes with multiple layers of gift wrap or saran wrap in between. The guests must then try to unwrap these layers wearing oven mitts as quickly as they can | |||
| What you will need | ||||
| Available on Amazon |
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| Buy it | Buy it | Buy it | Buy it | |
Santa Limbo
| Description | Guests take turns putting on a Santa belly and walking underneath the limbo bar. The guest who can limbo the lowest wins | |
| What you will need | ||
| Available on Amazon |
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| Buy it | Buy it | |
Guess that Christmas song
| Description | Guests split into groups and write down their answers for each round. The group that gets the most song titles and artists correct, wins | |
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| Available on Amazon |
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Christmas Charades
| Description | Guests write down the names of various Christmas-themed films or songs on pieces of paper. The guests then split into groups and take turns acting out Christmas-themed clues that were picked from the hat for the other group members to guess. The group that guesses the most actions correctly, wins. | ||
| What you will need | |||
| Available on Amazon |
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| Buy it | Buy it | Buy it | |
