Christmas Games for Family: 18 Party Games for All Ages
Christmas parties tend to have the same problem: too many people in one living room and nothing for them to do between dinner and presents. A couple of games fix that. They also give the shy cousin and the grandparent who only half speaks the language a reason to join in.
Every game below works with what you already have in the house. They are grouped by who is in the room, so pick a section and go.
Christmas games for the whole family
These work when your guests range from five to eighty-five.
1. Wrap race. Give each player or pair a roll of paper, tape and a box. First to wrap it neatly wins. For a harder round, one person can only use their left hand and the partner only their right.
2. Pin the nose on the reindeer. Draw a big reindeer on poster paper, cut out a red circle nose and play it like the donkey game. Blindfold, spin three times, go. Grandparents usually end up being the funniest players.
3. Christmas movie charades. Write movie titles on slips of paper and act them out in silence. Stick to the films everyone has seen a hundred times, so the kids have a chance against the adults.
4. Candy cane hunt. Hide candy canes around the house before guests arrive. Give each kid a paper bag and set a timer for five minutes. Hide a few low for the toddlers and a few on top of the fridge for the teenagers.
5. Snowball toss. Crumple white paper into balls, set out three buckets at different distances and give each bucket a point value. Everyone gets five throws. It needs no setup and keeps small kids busy for a surprising amount of time.
6. Name that carol. One person hums the first few notes of a Christmas song and the rest guess. Kids are often faster than adults here, which they enjoy enormously.
Christmas party games for adults
For the late part of the evening, after the kids are in bed.
7. White elephant with a steal limit. Everyone brings one wrapped gift under a set price. Draw numbers. Player one opens a gift; every player after that can open a new one or steal an opened one. Limit each gift to three steals so the game ends before midnight.
8. Christmas trivia, family edition. Mix general questions (how many reindeer pull Santa's sleigh in the old poem?) with questions about your own family. "Which year did the tree fall over" makes the evening.
9. Ugly sweater vote. If the party has a sweater theme, put a paper ballot box by the door. Prizes for the ugliest, the most homemade and the one most likely to light up.
10. The minute games. Set a timer for one minute per challenge: stack ten plastic cups into a tower with one hand, move five candies from one plate to another with a straw, unwrap a chocolate wearing oven mitts. These play well in teams of two.
11. Who am I, holiday edition. Stick a sticky note on each person's forehead with a Christmas character on it. Players ask yes or no questions to work out who they are. Santa, a snowman and a reindeer are easy; the second shepherd from the left in the nativity scene is not.
Quiet games for kids
When the sugar wears off and the little ones need to sit down.
12. Christmas I spy. Play I spy, but everything has to be on the tree or under it.
13. Draw Santa blindfolded. Each kid gets a sheet of paper, a marker and a blindfold. Read out the steps: draw the face, the hat, the beard, the eyes. The results get stuck to the fridge until March.
14. Christmas story chain. One person starts a story with one sentence. Each person adds one more. Kids will try to make Santa crash into something, and you should let them.
Free online Christmas games for one phone
Not every game has to involve paper and tape. These run in a browser with no download, so they work on any phone or laptop and can be passed around.
15. Present Drop. Fly a sleigh over a snowy town and tap to drop presents down the chimneys. Bounce a present off a roof for a trick delivery. Miss, and it lands on a sleeping dog. Short rounds, perfect for taking turns.
16. Clean It 100%. Melt the ice, blow the snow and scrape the frost off a frozen character. Every percent plays a note of a hidden tune. It is calm and a little hypnotic, which is what you want at 9 pm on Christmas Eve.
17. Capybara Stack. A capybara sits in a hot spring and you stack things on its head: oranges, ducks, a sleeping cat. Kids compete for the tallest tower.
18. Order Up, Kitty! A cat chef runs a burger joint. Fine for when the family dinner is still an hour away and the kids are hungry already.
How to run a family game night at Christmas
Pick three games, not ten. One active game to start (wrap race or snowball toss), one sit-down game while people eat dessert, and one for the end of the night. Write the plan on a sheet of paper so you do not have to remember it with a glass of eggnog in your hand.
Prizes help more than they should. A bag of small chocolates or a dollar-store trophy gets adults competing like it is the Olympics.
Mix the teams. Put a teenager with a grandparent and a five-year-old with an uncle. The game becomes the reason they talk.
For more online games with snow, presents and reindeer, see our Christmas games page, which gets new games every year at the same address.
