Happy New Year to all of my readers! 2017 seems to have passed so quickly, and here we are in 2018.
I’m a bit behind on posting, but our family celebrated our third annual “What Is It?” Christmas gift swap this year. You may remember that my sister created this game back in 2015,
Here are the rules:
- Find or acquire an item that you think will stump everyone else on Christmas Eve. Don’t spend more than $5 on it.
- Wrap and bring your item to the swap.
- Pass out scraps of paper and pencils to everyone.
- Person #1 chooses a wrapped gift from the pile and opens the gift. They show it to everyone and can pass it around.
- Every guest (other than the gift-opener) then writes their idea of what they feel the mystery item might be on a piece of paper.
- The papers are passed to Person #2.
- Person #2 reads all of the suggestions aloud to the group (so Person #1 cannot be influenced by recognizing the other guests’ handwriting.)
- Person #1 then chooses the suggestion that they liked best. If you’ve ever played Apples To Apples, you may already realize that the item’s actual purpose is not necessarily the “right” answer — in our group, many times the funniest answer suggested was the winner.
- Whoever wrote the “winning” description of the mystery item wins that item!
- Play then progresses to Person #2 and continues until there are no more wrapped gifts to open. At the end, if the same player wins more than one gift, he or she can re-gift them to anyone who didn’t win an amazing item to take home.
Last year, everyone brought a great assortment of unusual items to the Christmas party. This Christmas, here were some of the more interesting things that showed up at our 2017 “What Is It?” exchange:
None of us are still quite sure what this item actually is. It’s cast iron and is very heavy. The top swirly part lifts off to expose the metal dish underneath. My brother-in-law won it by writing “Two Turtle Doves. Now you know what they look like.”
The frog item on the left is actually a wooden birdhouse I picked up at the Goodwill store. Several people wrote variations on the theme of it being a Gene Simmons frog, or Cookie Monster’s crazy frog cousin.
We think the item on the right is a ravioli press, but it was also called a “Piranha Bite-Mark Maker” during our game.
What’s the thing on the left? I thought it must be a ceramic pie server, but several family members argued that it could not be a pie server without a pointed tip. My dad won it by calling it a decorative drywall mud trowel.
That item at the top? I won it by writing “Mrs. Asparagus is Pregnant.” Everyone agreed!
The silver item on the right was also won by my Dad, who wrote that it was fancy hub bling for a car wheel, adding “You just need three more.”
Doesn’t everyone need an “Ancient Aztec Wishing Swan?” Or a “Magic Key-Finding Teleportation Tray – touch, and your keys appear!” My sister now owns both of these.
While I believe this is some sort of oddly-shaped chip and dip set, I won it by writing that it was a “Lopsided Breast Protector.” Then I stuck it over my chest to demonstrate. (Hey, our Christmas get-togethers are a riot!)
This last item got lots of guesses, but the one that seemed to make the room laugh the most was “Firestarter.”
No one knew what it was, but Google informed us that it is actually a wine bottle puzzle. Put a wine bottle inside, assemble the puzzle (there are instructions online) and give as a gift to someone who you’d like to frustrate, apparently. My brother-in-law kept this to gift to someone in the future, so if you know him, this just might arrive at your door someday…
After three years of playing this game annually, I doubt we will stop in 2018! It’s so much fun to guess what these items might be, or simply make up ridiculous purposes for the “treasures” we find throughout the year.
Like this post? Here are some of the wonderful things people brought to past Christmas Eves:
Mary says
I look forward to your Christmas game posts each year now. I think the Swan dish might be an ash tray or incense burner?
I really wanted to respond too and tell you how young your husband looks! I guess that answers the question if you are still low carbing at your house. Wow what a difference!