12 Days of Christmas Gift Exchange and Party Ideas

These 12 days of Christmas party ideas are perfect for anyone looking for a unique Christmas party theme this year! With tons of treat ideas, free printables, and even a 12 days of Christmas gift exchange game – it’s everything you need for one amazing 12 days of Christmas celebration!

12 Days of Christmas Party Ideas

On the first day of Christmas, a fun idea came to me – a 12 days of Christmas party! For some reason I’ve had the 12 days of Christmas song stuck in my head all year long, so I decided to create my own version of the song and use it for a Christmas party theme.

My family always gives our 12 days of Christmas gifts every year, so I thought it’d be fun to incorporate that theme (and the song) into our party! And it was one of my favorite Christmas party themes ever!

1 Partridge for Your Christmas Tree

Last but not least, I created little stickers on that said, “A partridge for your Christmas tree.” I found these little gold (yay!) bird ornaments, bagged them up, and added the little stickers for the perfect party favor. Who doesn’t love getting new ornaments?

You could also skip the stickers and just use the first day from these 12 days of Christmas gift tags with the ornament!

2 Turtlenecks

This may have been my favorite. Instead of asking people to wear ugly sweaters, we encouraged turtlenecks. We ended up with a handful of people in ugly sweaters, a couple in regular holiday outfits, and at least two in turtlenecks.

3 French Foods

Forget the French hens and go with French foods instead. I chose macarons because they’re my favorite but you could easily do French breads + dips, cheeses, or a variety of pastries.

If you need ideas for fun Christmas appetizers or Christmas party foods that would go with a French foods theme, try these:

• Anything with brie – this baked brie with honey would be perfect for these brie bacon bites or even these pear and brie crescent bites!
• Ham and cheese Christmas tree appetizer – the base of these is puff pastry, which is French!
• Meringue Christmas trees – another Christmas tree treat inspired by the French!
• Christmas charcuterie board – fill it with French meats and cheese, you could even make it a Christmas tree cheese board!
• French toast casserole – if you’re doing a breakfast party, this would be a huge hit!

4 Taboo Words

One of my favorite games to play is one where you choose words at the beginning of the night that people can’t say. If they say them, they have to give away a particular object that they received at the beginning of the night to the person who heard them say a taboo word.

For this particular party, our words were Christmas, holiday, Santa, and gift. If anyone said any of those words, they had to give their ornament to someone else. And at the end of the night, the winner went home with all of the ornaments for their own Christmas tree as well as a gift card for being the big winner!

5 Golden Things

For my main party table, I decided to stick with just desserts. What’s Christmas without treats right? And instead of just decorating with the typical red and green, I went with red, green, blue, and gold as my accent color.

I started by wrapping the table and the wall with some cheap wrapping paper to give it a festive look (and bonus, no ironing!). Then I hung this gold ball wreath (golden thing #1!) on the wall and added a little gold wrapping paper stripe to give the appearance of a wrapped present.

Then on the table itself, I just added a a couple of glittery gold trees (golden things #2 & #3), a gold ball tree (golden thing #4), and this cute joy table sign (golden thing #5). Party tables don’t have to be complicated, and I think the simplicity of the desserts + gold things worked well.

I continued the use of the gold throughout the party by incorporating gold chargers throughout all of my tables and used these fun gold lettered be jolly plates for desserts. It was a simple and fun way to connect all of the elements together.

6 Games for Playing

I’m a huge fan of Christmas party games and always like to have a variety of games to play. For this party, I actually created 12 days of Christmas games to go along with the theme!

I also did the gift exchange game I talked about already and two printable games from this list. I always try to provide a variety of games so people who LOVE games are happy and people who will play but mostly just tolerate them, are happy as well.

• Christmas emoji game
• Christmas trivia game
• Christmas higher or lower game
• Christmas music bingo
• Christmas floor game
• Christmas recall game

If you want something other than those, here are some of our most popular Christmas games that would work:

7 Songs for Singing

Just like with the dancing, bring on the Christmas music and get people to sing along. Or plan an entire game like Christmas name that tune around singing Christmas songs. I love doing How Do You Doo to Christmas, it’s pretty hilarious!

8 Marshmallows Melting

As part of my 12 drinks for drinking table, I set up a create your own hot chocolate bar complete with various types of marshmallows, four hot chocolate flavors, spoons, and Santa and reindeer cups. 

You can do whatever you want but I did peppermint hot chocolate, Grinch hot chocolate, my 5-minute hot chocolate, and frozen hot chocolate for people who didn’t want something so hot!

9 People Dancing

This was an easy one – I just used my favorite Christmas playlist and encouraged people to dance. If people still aren’t dancing, just turn the Christmas music on and hope that the kids get the dance party started.

10 Treats for Keeping

Nobody really wants Lords a leaping, so I went with treats for keeping instead. I created mini cookie tins with my own design for people to fill up with their favorite holiday treats but you could totally just buy regular ones and just add tags or stickers!

One word of advice, go with the mini tins or else you’ll have people taking whole jars full of candy home. The mini tins were the perfect size for my holiday treats for keeping buffet.

If you don’t want to do candy, you could also do homemade Christmas treats. Any of these would be perfect for sending home with guests:

• Reindeer chow
• Christmas bark
• Slow cooker candied nuts
• Homemade gingerbread men
• Oreo Christmas balls
• Reese’s peanut butter fudge
• Marshmallow popcorn balls
• Edible peppermint cookie dough

11 Gifts for Swiping

I’m a huge fan of gift exchanges and not the typical white elephant ones either. For my day 11, I asked guests to bring a wrapped gift and we played the fun 12 days of Christmas gift exchange game at the bottom of this post!

I created a big banner that said, “11 Gifts for Swiping” so people knew which table was for the gift exchange gifts. 

It was fun to do something different that still had people swiping gifts without the standard draw a number version. I’ve got 20 other fun gift exchange game ideas as well, if you want to break the theme and go with something non 12 days of Christmasy.

Keep reading below for instructions on how to play the game and the free printable gift exchange cards! If you’re doing something with kids where you don’t want stealing gifts, you could do one of these left right Christmas games instead!

12 Drinks for Drinking

For my 12th day, I setup a 12 drinks for drinking table complete with, you guessed it, 12 different things. Two types of sparkling cider (with gold champagne glasses), a handful of punch options like this Christmas punch, homemade wassail, this holiday punch, gumdrop punch, waters, and all sorts of varieties of hot chocolate like I mentioned above.

To stick with the theme, I customized snowy scene cups and bottle labels with the “12 drinks for drinking” lyric.

Preparation:

Ask everyone to bring one wrapped gift to the party. Have them place their gifts on the table (ideally the 11 gifts for swiping table).

Print out the free printable 12 days of Christmas game cards below and put them in a bag or bowl.

Write down pairs of numbers for each person playing (i.e., if you have 20 people playing, write down the #s 1-20 twice, then cut out and put in a bowl. Or alternately, pick out a set of matching playing cards from two decks of cards (i.e., A-K of hearts and A-7 of Spades). This is a much easier way to do this.

How to Get Started:

When you’re ready to play the game, have everyone pick one gift from the table and go stand or sit in a circle. You need to be in a circle because some of the cards have the entire group do something like switch right or left, and you need someone on your right or left to do that.

Make sure people know the gift you start with really doesn’t matter because it’s very unlikely to be the gift you actually end up with at the end of the game. So just pick something quickly and sit down.

Pass out numbers or playing cards to everyone in the circle randomly.

How to Play:

Once everyone has their playing cards, pick one from the matching set from a bowl or bag. Whoever’s card matches that one goes first.

On their turn, they pick a card from the bag of game cards, read it out loud, and follow the directions on the card.

If the card says that everyone does something, everyone does it. If it does not say everyone does it, then just the person who picked the card does it. If a card has the person trade with one other person, both the players involved with the trade should unwrap their gift after the trade.

If a card involves everyone in the switch, only the person whose turn it is (that picked the card) should unwrap their gift. Everyone continues playing and switching wrapped and unwrapped gifts until the final person takes their turn then the game is over and everyone keeps their final gift.

After they complete the action on the card, their turn is over.

Pull another playing card or number and that person does the same thing. Keep going until everyone has had a turn.

Gift Exchange Game Video

Watch the video below to see this 12 Days of Christmas gift exchange game in action!

Enter your first name and email address in the form below to get the printable free download PDF. You will receive a link to download the PDF to your email within minutes. Print on card stock and you’re on your way.

If you’d prefer to not provide your email address, you can get a copy in my shop here.

If you do not see the form, click here to get to it.

If you do not see the email with the printable design templates immediately after you fill out the form, make sure to check your promotions, spam, and junk folders!

The file will include:

1. Instructions
2. 24 gift exchange cards with a 12 days of Christmas theme
3. Use policy – all files are for personal use only