Coffee Break with Liz and Kate

I am big on holiday traditions.  I think it’s the  memories of the cherished holiday traditions of our childhoods that warm our hearts and make the holidays so special.  Let me share with you today one of my family’s favorite, and  slightly unusual traditions.

It’s our Wacky gift exchange.  When my family first started our gift exchange tradition, we stuck to the standard gift exchange rules: draw names, buy gifts, and exchange them.  Well, if you know me at all by now, you know that I couldn’t be satisfied with that routine for long.  Had to find a way to add a twist, mix things up and make it more challenging.

So first we set a price limit  of $5 on the exchange, forcing us to be creative and thrifty with our purchases. Then as if that didn’t complicate things enough, we added a theme for the exchange. The first year it was “Colors”. When we drew names, we also each drew a different color.  The gift had to be predominately the color that we drew.  After a few  years of that, we switched it up to letters of the alphabet. A little more complicated, yet still doable.

And as the years have progressed we’ve added new themes and have  turned this simple gift exchange into a wacky, sometimes complicated, sometimes stressful, but always fun adventure in shopping. We’ve also upped the spending limit to $10, as you can’t really find anything within the $5 range any more. Here are some of our recent themes:

• Christmas Songs – where we had to listen to the song and find some way to tie in the gift
• Countries – where we had to find a gift from that country (This was way waaaay too hard, as we had 15 people in the exchange and had to come up with some lesser known countries to get 15.)
• Paintings – where we printed out our paintings and had to find something in that painting to give as the gift
• Movies – where the gift had to tie into the movie
• Rooms of the house – where the gift had to  logically go with the room picked

And this year we are doing Decades.  The gift has to come from anything that happened within the given decade. I happen to be giving to my 23 year old daughter with a gift from the 1950′s.  No clue what it will be yet, but hey, I still have 9 days to figure it out.

So if your family is looking to start a new fun tradition this year, it’s not too late to start a Wacky Gift Exchange. Might I just suggest starting out with one of the more simple themes for the first year. We usually find that it’s much more complicated and difficult than we think it’s going to be. The most important thing is to just have fun spending time being silly with your family.

~ Kate

* Leave a comment on this, or any, post and be automatically entered in this week’s giveaway.

Enjoy your Coffee Beak.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!