The Radical Potential of the White Elephant Gift Exchange

Ideas for centering generosity – rather than shopping – this holiday season

A few weeks ago in The Auntie Bulletin’s first annual¹ Gift-Not-Giving Guide, I argued that many of us are tyrannized by giftspectations at the holidays. In theory, Christmas and other gifting holidays are meant to be joyful occasions for generosity and for connecting with our loved ones.

Now, for many people, joyful holiday gifting isn’t just a theory — it’s even actually true! If you’re one of those people who get a lot of joy out of choosing just the right gift for their loved ones, I’m not here to yuck your yum. Generosity is beautiful, and today’s post offers some strategies for how the rest of us might be able to join you in actually enjoying holiday gifting.

For many of us, however, the current reality is that choosing and buying and wrapping and transporting and giving gifts creates stress, extra work, financial hardship, and unwanted debt – not to mention generating a huge amount of waste. I’ve encountered statistics that are appalling but which I now cannot find (drop ‘em in the comments, Aunties!) about what percentage of holiday gifts are returned, regifted, just sit on a shelf, or make their way swiftly to a landfill. It’s a lot. And sometimes it feels like we’re all just giving each other the same not-very-meaningful things – as as one of my favorite musicians, Thao Nguyen, highlights in her hilarious and wonderful song, “Gift Card.”

In the video below she’s joined by one of my other favorite women alive, the comedian Maria Bamford, and you should listen at your peril because it's delightfully catchy and might get stuck in your head for several days. (Ask me how I know).

Today’s post is about how we can rethink our holiday gifting traditions to center joy, generosity, and togetherness. In particular, I’m about to make a full throated pitch for the radically transformative potential of the white elephant gift exchange. Then I’ll offer a bunch of other ideas for rethinking gifting – gathered and curated to help you shop less, stress less, and experience more genuine joy this holiday season.

Oh, How I Love a White Elephant

The white elephant gift exchange, otherwise known as the Yankee swap, otherwise known as the Dirty Santa, gets a bad rap in entertainment media. From The Office to Saturday Night Live, white elephants are occasions for people to be jerks to each other. I’ve watched a lot of The Office in my time, both UK and US versions, but watching this clip I am freshly so sad for poor sweet Phyllis! Michael Scott is the worst!

If your circle of loved ones is made up of people who actually behave like Michael Scott (or like Austin Butler’s character in this SNL sketch), you may want to give the white elephant a pass.²

But otherwise, I think of The Auntie Bulletin as a space to envision communities in which we increasingly know how to treat each other with love. Among a group of people who are even baseline capable of acting decent (people who can manage not to have tantrums over ashtrays or be mean to Phyllis), a white elephant can be a sweet, trash-talking delight that’s fun for all ages. It’s also great for helping newcomers and visitors start to feel genuinely welcome, included, and at ease. White elephants are ridiculous, they are low-stakes, they’re not too time consuming, and they’re nearly guaranteed to make everyone laugh.

Case in point: a few years back one of my nephews showed up at my family’s annual Christmas gathering in an extremely bad mood. He’d recently gotten his drivers’ license, driven himself two hours to my parents’ house in his new used car that he bought with the money he earned at his after-school job, and gotten into some legitimately-exasperating car trouble along the way. He stormed in late, leaned in the corner with his arms folded, and glowered. Then it was white elephant time, and 10 minutes later he was doing that grudgingly-grinning-against-your-will thing that is universally cute in all humans, and especially cute in teenagers.

For those not familiar or who need a refresher, here’s how you play:

1. There’s a gift for each guest – usually with a very low value cap, something like $10. Traditionally, each person contributes a wrapped gift, but in my family, some combination of my mom, my dad, my sister, and I buy all the gifts and nobody else has to do anything.³ Read to the end of this post for my new How-To feature (!), which, today, is about how to select gifts for a white elephant gift exchange.

2. Put the gifts in a pile. Putting out the gifts is a great job for the kids. They can and should shake them and try to guess what’s inside.

3. Everyone gets a randomly drawn number. More good jobs for kids: writing the numbers on scraps of paper, putting them in a hat or basket, and taking them around for everyone to draw from.

4. The person with the lowest number goes first. They draw a gift from the pile, open it, and show it to everyone. At this point you’ll be like, “Huh, great, a chocolate orange. This is dumb. Why are we doing this again?” I know because this is the point at which I have a variation on this thought literally every year.

5. Each person goes in order. They can either choose an unopened gift to open and show everyone, or steal from a previous gift-opener. It gets more fun when people start stealing. My sister remembers: “My kid got a harmonica in the white elephant when she was like 5, and I kept yelling, ‘Steal the harmonica! Steal the harmonica!’ but no one did, which of course made her even more gleeful about it.”

6. If someone’s gift is stolen, they get to pick, open, and show around another gift. Sometimes this will set off a cascade of thefts until someone finally picks a new one to open.

7. At the end, whoever went first gets to steal a gift if they want. They swap with whoever they stole from.

It’s important to set a rule for how many times a single gift can be stolen: 2 or 3 times is ideal. No steal-backs.

Collusion by members of the same household is rampant and encouraged. For example, my semi-sister-in-law⁴ is known for encouraging her husband to steal anything that’s cozy so she can have it for herself.

At the end, anyone who wants to can trade. If there’s a disappointed kid (or grownup), somebody will usually take pity on them and swap. In my family we also usually have a few extra gifts in the pile that people can trade out for as well. (This is also a good plan when you don’t know exactly how many people will be showing up).

In the end, everyone winds up with something kind of stupid that isn’t particularly tailored to them and they likely don’t need, but nobody winds up with multiple potentially-stupid things they don’t need, which – let’s face it – is how holiday gift-giving usually works. Shoot, I sometimes regift my white elephant prize into the next year’s white elephant. This is because it’s really barely about the gifts at all – mostly it’s about good-natured heckling, haphazard strategy, and theft from your loved ones.

White elephants are wonderful for all ages because everyone is an equal participant and there are multiple opportunities to interact with each other person. Those teenagers and young adults at your holiday gatherings who are typically glued to their phones? Suddenly they’re conspiring with their little niece against their grandmother, much to grandma’s delight. And when the game is done it’s suddenly a lot easier to engage people – even (or especially!) the teenagers – in a raucous board game or card game, where the smack talk continues to flow.

The white elephant constitutes, to my mind, a radical rethinking of dominant Western holiday gift-giving traditions – especially when, as in my family, it slowly comes to replace other gift giving nearly altogether.⁵ Here’s what I think is quietly and wonderfully disruptive about the white elephant:

• There’s little possibility of trying to buy happiness, either for yourself or for others, because the gifts are small and silly and don’t matter.

• There’s a massive reduction in the number of overall gifts purchased.

• You can definitely buy all the gifts secondhand and thereby prevent new, additional stuff from entering the already-torrential flood of stuff that’s currently microplastically disintegrating into our oceans and filling up the landfills and I know this is a downer but it’s true and it matters and you know it.

• It invites trading, sharing, collaborating, paying attention to each other, and enjoying one another’s company, which are among the most important life skills we’re going to need for the messed-up future we’re facing.

Now let me name a bunch of other ways you can practice joyful generosity and not-so-consumerist gifting this holiday season.

Joyful Generosity and Not-So-Consumerist Gifting

I don’t know about you, but I’ve received a ton of gift guides in my inbox recently. While most are round-ups of things you can buy (some quite wonderful), a few offer real alternatives. I loved Arianna’s suggestion to give plant cuttings in her No-Spend Gift Guide, as well as Laura Fenton’s idea to restrict gift-giving to kids only, in her 10 Ideas to Shake Up Holiday Traditions. Both of these idea round-ups are terrific and worth a full read-through. What else?

Holiday activities with kids, courtesy of Auntie Bulletin readers!

• Reader Sadie wraps and hides presents for the kids in her life around her house; you could equally wrap and hide everyday items, or even toys the kids already own, and it would still be super fun!

• Reader Emily engages the kids in her life in making gifts for everyone else, up to and including the wrapping paper. Here are a bunch of ideas for DIY gifts you can make with kids, with links to tutorials.

Acts of service are always nice.

Ann Friedman, author of a wonderful and pioneering online newsletter and co-author of Big Friendship, suggests gifting a future ride to and from the airport.

Honestly, it feels so nice to have someone pull up right at the curb to pick you up. And if you're anything like me, you never want to ask your friends to do an airport run for you.... unless they have offered to be your personal shuttle service as a holiday gift. You could even make a cute little IOU card. ("Redeemable for one trip to and one trip from the airport.")

For parents, I could imagine gifting them something similar – a ride for their kids to and from school, or to and from soccer practice. For kids, maybe it’s a coupon to help them clean their room. What you’re going for, with acts of service, is support for slightly burdensome tasks.

Classics for a reason.

• Give food – homemade or beloved or special in some other way

• Give experiences – if you’re in the vicinity of the kids in your life, take them somewhere fun and cool; if not, consider an annual family pass to their nearest aquarium, zoo, or children’s museum

If you shop, shop local and small business.

Anna Brones of the Creative Fuel newsletter wrote this excellent post on the super-stressful financial, emotional, and creative reality of the holiday season for artists and small business owners – a reality to which I can suddenly relate as a 44-year-old newbie newsletterist hoping to make a living as a writer.

• Intentionalist is an online directory that “lets you find and support local small businesses and the diverse people behind them.” Looks like they’re only in the U.S. for now. It looks pretty comprehensive for my zip code in Seattle, but I’m curious how well they cover different areas. If you try it, drop your thoughts in the comments!

• If you’re buying for kids, consider skipping toys. You can give books or craft supplies or, inspired by Katherine Johnson Martinko’s Analog Family, tools!

How about giving a gift to someone who actually needs it?

This does in fact actually feel good and satisfying – I can vouch. One year while my family was slowly phasing out gifts, my mom and I agreed she’d spend my gift money instead on supporting women and girls in the Global South to access menstrual hygiene products, and I genuinely appreciated it so much more than receiving a new sweater or whatever. It ended up being a gateway to my becoming someone who gives away money. Here are some other ways to send a gift to a stranger in need:

• Heifer International lets you give a goat, a cow, a sheep, a water buffalo (!), a flock of chicks or ducks, a hive of honeybees and beekeeper training (!!) – or you can give water, or send a girl to school, or other cool stuff.

• Toys for Tots is run by the U.S. Marine Corps, which I did not know. Now, that’s where I want my military tax dollars to go! You can donate money, or if you want to scratch that go-to-Target-and-buy-stuff itch, you can donate actual toys as requested by actual kids.

• Prison Fellowship Angel Tree is a faith-based organization that helps churches gather donations of new toys for kids whose primary caregivers are incarcerated. Again, this is about donations of specific toys as requested by specific children. Angel Tree also does summer camps and sports camps and things. If you’re a churchgoer, this might be an organization to bring to your pastor or elder board’s attention.

Give The Auntie Bulletin!

People love it! (Some people).

When On Befriending Kids went viral I got my very first troll. Weirdly, I loved it? It feels so legitimizing to have a hater or two – even if they’re only hating on my ideas and not on me personally. A woman can dream.

Your Weekly How-To: How to Select Gifts for a White Elephant

New feature! Going forward, I’m trying a weekly how-to explaining how to perform cool Auntie skills. Planned items include:

• How to teach a kid to use a big sharp knife

• How to tell a really good story

• How to help a kid learn to draw with confidence

• How to get a teenager to tell you about their friends

This series is going to be a good one! And Aunties, as I said up top, in January it’s going behind a paywall, along with the Three Recommended Reads and the Cute Kid Video. I know, I’m sorry. A woman’s gotta make a living. Upgrade to paid and don’t miss out!⁶

Today’s skill is selecting gifts for a white elephant gift exchange. Here’s what you do:

1. Decide who’s doing the buying. I honestly enjoy doing the whole batch myself these days. It’s a nice excuse to go shopping for someone who usually doesn’t shop much, and you can more easily coordinate having enough gifts for kids vs. adults and make sure there are at least one or two things that will please each person. But alternatively, you can divvy it up among a few family members (maybe not the ones currently raising small children!), or go old school and ask everyone to bring a wrapped gift with a cost cap. But for the sake of this tutorial, let’s assume you’re doing a lot of the buying yourself.

2. Regardless of who’s shopping, set a cost cap. I recommend $10 USD with a little wiggle room, but you could go big and set it at $15. Remember that obtaining good, meaningful, wonderful gifts that will bring the recipient lasting pleasure is not the point. The point is to play a silly game that will result in good-natured intergenerational smack talk.

3. Decide where you’ll buy your gifts. I guess you can buy stuff online, but haven’t we done enough of that lately? If you go that route, I implore you to skip Amazon, now and forever. Instead, let’s go in person to Goodwill! (Or another thrift store befitting your preferences and geographic region)! Thrifting is great for a white elephant because there’s no expectation that the gifts be fancy and yet you can also get more bang for your buck. At a thrift store, all the stuff for sale is already in the “stuff stream,”⁷ so you’re not adding anything new to the world that will later wind up in a landfill or the ocean or being dismantled for parts by child laborers on the other side of the world.

4. Buy stuff! Consider bringing a kid or two to help you select all the best that Goodwill has to offer. Choose enough presents for everyone who will be attending the holiday gathering, plus a few extras. Get some gifts that are definitely good for kids, and for the rest, get general, family-friendly, all-purpose crowd-pleasers. They can be funny or practical or cozy or mysterious. Gag gifts are great but not necessary. You can get things that are useful! Browse the aisles and find some winners!

5. Bring the items home and clean them up. Take off the price tags (the sticker ones that come apart when you try to peel them off respond well to being pried up with a straight razor). Run things through the laundry or dishwasher. Clean the glass in a picture frame with window cleaner. You know the drill. Just make them look their best. Kids can help with this step too.

6. Swing by the grocery store and get a few delicious snacks to add to the mix. In my family there’s always a can of almond roca – even though my mom also usually makes some homemade that’s way better and literally sitting out on the kitchen table at the same time as the white elephant. But getting your own whole can! It’s something special!

7. Wrap and you’re set! Again, involve kids if they’re around. They can even make the wrapping paper.

8. Save the leftover gifts for next year, or donate them back to the thrift store.

The miracle of birth.

Think this beauty cost less than $15?

A giant penny makes your cat look tiny!

Three Recommended Reads

One. Passive aggressive work emails with a toddler.

Bess Kalb writes The Grudge Report, which is very entertaining. Check out this laugh-out-loud funny post from January 2022, then share it with your parent friends and demonstrate that you see them and you care about their plight.

Two. Human interaction is a luxury good.

Did you see this opinion piece by Jessica Grose the other day in The New York Times? In it, she argues that human interaction has become a luxury good.

We’re increasingly becoming a society in which very wealthy people get obsequious, leisurely human care, like concierge medicine paid out of pocket, apothecaries with personal shoppers and private schools with tiny class sizes and dead-tree books. Everybody else might receive long waits for 15-minute appointments with harried doctors, a public school system with overworked teachers who are supplemented by unproven apps to “personalize” learning and a pharmacy with self-checkout.

I buy Grose’s argument here – and Allison Pugh’s, whose book The Last Human Job Grose is writing about. Yet what immediately struck me about this line of reasoning is that we can and should choose to prioritize human interaction. Building kinship and community is fundamentally about this very value. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in the absence of meaningful social supports, we have to build our own.

Three. Who are feminist baby books for?

Look, I’m sorry to hate on other people’s writing, but nonfiction kids’ books about social justice issues often rub me the wrong way. I’m looking at you, A is For Activist. I so often feel like these books are actually produced and purchased to make adults feel good, and aren’t really about the needs or interests of children. If they were, they’d convey the same message in an actually kid-friendly way – for example, through a good story! Rebecca Onion wrote a thoughtful article for Slate about this topic.

I’m a feminist, I plan to raise my daughter as a feminist, and I know, of course, that these books have the very best of intentions. But since having a child, I’ve also become hyperaware of the fact that we often misunderstand very young children’s minds and expect a lot more adult thinking from them than we should…. Board books are traditionally intended for children ages 0­–3. Should we really expect toddlers to have the capability for abstraction that’s required to understand a concept like “LGBTQIA”?

Coming Attractions

On deck for December, we’ve got a post on how to respond when a kid gives you something they made for you… and you don’t know what it is. We’ve got a call to move closer to your people. And we’ve got a Q&A about Auntiehood with Ann Friedman of the OG newsletter AF Weekly, co-author of Big Friendship, and suggester (above) of gifting rides the airport. I’m stoked.

And Now, the Cute Kid Video of the Week

This child is a child after my own heart (and body). She is not a zoomer-arounder, and certainly not on a steep icy ski-slope. Although after you watch the video (probably several times in a row like I did), you should click on “See more” at the bottom of the video and read her mom’s account of how these two went on to negotiate their day.

Nothing Sold, Bought, or Processed

The Auntie Bulletin is an ad-free, anti-capitalist publication that will never try to sell you anything and receives no money from affiliate links. I can only offer it if readers like you voluntarily make modest donations to keep the lights on. The big posts in this newsletter do not have a paywall, and I plan to keep it that way. I ask that if you appreciate what you read here, you take a few seconds right now to become a paid subscriber. It’s affordable at only $5 a month, and it allows everyone to be able to access The Auntie Bulletin, regardless of their income.

1. Will there be a second annual Gift-Not-Giving Guide? Have I said all I have to say about this topic? Tune in sometime around Black Friday 2025 to find out. It’ll be a fun surprise for both of us!

2. Also, if there’s much alcohol at your holiday gatherings, you might want to do the white elephant before anyone gets belligerent.

3. My sister: “For our family’s very first ever white elephant, I bought all the gifts at the Dollar Tree or the Target Dollar Spot, and then brought them across the state in a duffel bag on the Greyhound bus. We’ve gotten a bit more upscale since then, but not much.”

4. My sister’s ex-husband’s second wife. Families are complicated.

5. Exceptions to my family’s not-much-gifting practice these days: The kids get some gifts from their grandparents, and we have one out-of-state aunt who is a generous and avid gifter and sends everyone a big pile of presents every year with no apparent resentment about our lack of reciprocity.

6. If you can’t afford a paid subscription due to final hardship, shoot me a message in the Substack app or email me at auntiebulletin at gmail dot com and I’ll comp you a subscription, no questions asked.

7. “Stuff stream” is a legitimate technical term that I definitely did not just make up because I don’t know vocabulary about supply chains.