I don't like white elephant exchanges for that same reason. I don't usually have the heart to take things away from people.

The Office also did a painfully good episode about Christmas gift exchanges. They get a lot of things right on that show.

The fun was in trying to offload whatever horrible thing you received.

See, now, I totally get that. I went to one of those, and got something totally random and ridiculous, and it's fine. It just sucks when there are some kind of cool or useful things, and you get... paper.

I once was at a white elephant gifty thing where one of the items was a Penthouse Forum. (This was a long time ago, before most of us had the internet for porn.)

For anyone who's ever done presentations.

[link]

And if you are, what kind of slime-off-the-bottom-of-the-pond scum are the rest of us?

Yeah, dude. I don't have a book OR a cat, let alone a frickin' man and some root.

giant ceramic ram's head - best White Elephant gift ever.

I like the idea of WE at parties, but it needs to be clear you are either ALL doing joke or ALL doing inexpensive but not crap gifts - ALSO if it is a joke one - trashing the gift right at the party should be clearly stated as ok.

We always had a really fun time with the White Elephant gift exchange. There was always something odd and funny and made us all laugh hysterically, even if we couldn't end up with it. We weren't mean spirited about it and there were never any hard feelings. Except for the time I got screwed out of the Teacup of Destiny.

I'm anti-white elephant, but when forced into it end up doing this crazy psychological dance where I try to take away a gift that I think the receivee didn't like but was too polite to say so about. Not, you know, one that I want.

The moral of this is that if you are in a white elephant with me, don't be too opaque about your reaction.

The best white elephant variant was when my friend called me up at the spur of the moment and invited me to her group's holiday party that evening (in, like, two hours). Therefore I neither brought cookies for the cookie exchange nor ornaments for the ornament exchange, but they had extras, so I ended up with delicious cookies and a completely gorgeous handmade ornament, but for free!

I've never done white elephant, and it sounds like a lot of fun.