My (extended) family does a White Elephant because it’s far cheaper than having to buy gifts for everyone and is much less pressure than a Secret Santa. It’s always a fun game, but yeah, effort is made to make the gifts decent. I got a bookshelf this year and stuck my cousin with a box of chocolate covered peanuts in exchange.

I’ve never heard of gifts having to be bad or that being the qualifier for making it a White Elephant. I thought it was more about the game aspect to gift giving.

If you scroll down to the rules part you’ll see where the idea is that gifts can be swapped around and/or stolen. I would argue that the game part of it is what sets White Elephant apart from a traditional gift exchange or Secret Santa more than the quality of the gifts. So is there a word for it when you do that part of the game but make the gifts decent?

TIL

The Trickster

A white elephant is originally a term used dating back to the 1600s for something very valuable but has no useful purpose and is not (or no longer) wanted.

This is actually procrastination from studying for my licensing exam!

In this variety of ‘white elephant’ or ‘dirty santa’ you bring a silly gift wrapped - anything from a tortilla blanket to a canvas of handsome Squidward. The presents are put in the middle and an order is decided via names drawn from a hat, etc. The first person picks a gift, opens it and displays to everyone. The second person can either steal the first person’s gift or pick a gift from the pile and so on! Usually there are a limited number of steals and each group might have their own rules. All in all, it’s just fun to do with friends/family!

That's a Yankee Swap, my family does that every year

Inside the toilet was a cute cat coffee cup and a box of hot chocolate mix & inside the plunger was a fun wine/bottle opener that looked like a bat (the wings opened during use of the corkscrew) with some lottery scratch offs! In hindsight, it would have been cool if the inside would have aligned with the shape - there’s always next year!

A bit bigger than regular shits, but small enough to not require the poop knife

It's almost right 💀

Secret Santa is a different game, where you buy a gift for a specific person. Dirty Santa/White Elephant you pick wrapped gifts at random and "steal" them from each other.

That’s cool. But it’s not a white elephant.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant_gift_exchange

“A white elephant gift exchange,[1] Yankee swap[2] or Dirty Santa[3][nb 1] is a party game where amusing and impractical gifts are exchanged during festivities. The goal of a white elephant gift exchange is to entertain party-goers rather than to gain a genuinely valuable or highly sought-after item.”

My office does a white elephant swap and the gifts are typically decent and/or funny. Many of the gifts got "stolen".

The alternative was Secret Santa which imo is terrible because do you really know your coworkers and their interests? What if you draw the bosses name?

That’s dedication

[deleted]

Next time I clog the toilet, I'm texting my wife "Bring me the pungler"

What is a white elephant gift

Are you trying to say that a Wacky Waving Arm Flailing Inflatable Tube Man is a bad gift?!

Idk what they're talking about the gifts needing to be bad. My friend group and now my work group are doing a white elephant. We had a $50 limit in our friend group. There were nice bottles of whiskey/scotch, a really cool back massager that works at home or in your car, a karaoke speaker and microphone, a giant button activated wearable Optimus Prime helmet, lotions and body wash stuff from bed bath and beyond, a Switch game. Sure some of them are silly but they're not bad gifts. The massager is legit!! We all laughed at the helmet and then took turns trying it on.

The last family Christmas I attended at my husband's we played white elephant and those fucks had tablets in the mix. They were like Amazon fire tablets but still new and free to whoever stole em.

But the idea of swapping gifts around is unique. White Elephant is also a game.

That's just gifts

Is there a word for it when the gifts are good? My family does a “white elephant” but the gifts are supposed to be good.

Secret Santa is when everyone pulls the name of another participant and buys that specific person a gift. Usually you try to get them something they genuinely want.

White Elephant/Yankee Swap is when everyone brings a gift without a specific recipient in mind, everyone pulls a number, and you pick a gift in that order and can choose to either keep it or force a previous opener to swap with you. A higher number is better because you have more to choose from, except for #1 who gets their pick of anything at the end. The gifts often tend to be on the silly side.

Yep, also called a Yankee Swap.