Christmas is only a month away, and our friends at notjustbingo.com have given us some fun holiday games to play at your Christmas party!

Christmas Charades – Make a list of Christmas activities for participants to act out, like kissing under the mistletoe or baking holiday cookies. Also encourage participants to act out the titles of popular Christmas carols.

Christmas Gift Wrap Relay – Divide into teams and compete to be the first team to have each of their players wrap empty boxes using wrapping paper, ribbons, and bows.

Christmas Trivia – Divide players into teams, and ask them interesting Christmas Trivia questions. Award holiday candy as the prize to the winning team.

Christmas Scavenger Hunt – Have fun with residents as you help them search for Christmas objects in your facility during a fun indoor Christmas scavenger hunt game. Be sure to award fun prizes to the first person who finds everything on their list.

Hot Potato: Christmas Edition – Wrap several gifts, like those bingo prizes no one claims, to play a fun game of Hot Potato with your residents. To play, seat residents in a circle, and have them pass around a gift while the Christmas music plays in the background. When the music stops, whoever is holding the gift gets to open it and keep it. Then ask that person to leave the circle, remove their chair, and insert a new gift for a new round of Hot Potato among the other residents.

Candy Canes. For this table game, which is similar to Spoons, encourage players to be the first to get four-of-a-kind in their hand. To play, first place candy canes in the middle of the table – one less than the number of players. Then, deal four cards to each participant. Encourage one participant (usually the dealer) to pick a card from the deck and pass it to the player on his right if he does not want to keep the card. If, however, he wants to keep the card, then he must discard one of his other cards and pass that card to the player to his right. (All players must maintain four cards in their hand at all times.) The dealer continues to get new cards from the deck while moving at a fast pace, so that all players continuously pass unwanted cards to the player on their right. The first person who gets four-of-a-kind in his hand must quietly reach for a candy cane, which will trigger everyone else to reach for a candy cane. The person who does not get a candy cane is out of the game. Continue the game, making sure that there is always one fewer candy cane on the table than the number of participants playing, until there is only one player left – the winner.

Holiday Word Search – Download copies of puzzles from the Internet for fun competitions. Encourage participants to be the first to complete their puzzle.

Name That Christmas Carol. Simply play the beginning notes of a Christmas song and encourage participants to correctly name the title of that Christmas carol.

Christmas Pictionary – Use a fun Christmas activity game kit that has Christmas words that residents can draw so that their teammates can guess. (You can also use the game kit to play other games like charades and scavenger hunt.)

Holiday Band – Divide residents into two teams to see who has the best holiday band performance. For the activity, pass out jingle bell sticks as well as other small instruments for residents to play as they sing Christmas carols. Beforehand, pass out Christmas carol lyric sheets for each team to follow along when it’s their turn to sing and perform a Christmas carol. Invite your facility’s administrators to judge the best performance.

Find more ideas from Notjustbingo on the S&S blog here.

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About Not Just Bingo:

Not Just Bingo is an online resource of fun, senior activity ideas for activity professionals of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. They have been providing fun activity ideas online since 2009, and continue to assist activity professionals across the country by creating meaningful and engaging activity ideas for their residents that go “beyond bingo.” Not Just Bingo feels privileged to help activity directors better the living experiences of their residents while demonstrating that a senior’s quality of life can actually improve when they move to a nursing facility!

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