Christmas Cookie Exchange

My sister and I take turns hosting a holiday cookie exchange every year around Christmas. Here are some ideas for planning your own cookie swap.

1. Invite Friends

   Send invites to all your friends. I go the easy route and use Facebook but you can send invites in the mail or through other evite providers.

2. Purchase Tins / Cellophane Bags

   I purchase tins and bags for myself as well as extras for guests to use. I’ve collected quite a few varieties over the years. Line the tins with parchment paper. This helps keep them from shifting around and breaking – especially if you are shipping them.

3. Purchase Prizes

   I like to have categories for prizes to encourage more extravagant cookie creation. I typically have the following cookie categories: best all around, most creative, best tasting, and best looking. I typically purchase a prize that relates to the category (i.e. cookie cutters for the best looking cookie winner). Examples of things I’ve bought include cookie cutters, cookie recipe books, cookie scoop, cookie stamps, decorative dishes, aprons, and cupcake/cookie carrier.

   If you’re tight on budget, you can reduce the competition to just have a best overall cookie or hand out ribbons. 

4. Provide Platters

   I have a lot of pretty platters so I put out extras for guests to use so they can take home cookies in their containers that they brought. Plus this makes the cookie display really gorgeous!
   

5. Create Cookie Placecards

   We’ve done various themes over the years. I’ve found it’s easier for voting if the placecards are numbered.

   Here are a few templates you can use:

   Cookie-Placecards-Snowflake-Theme-numbered
   Cookie-Placecards-Tree-Theme-numbered
   Cookie-Placecards-Tree-Theme-unnumbered

   

6. Create Vote/Scoring cards

   We’ve done the scoring different ways to mix it up each year. This year we rated each cookie between 1-5 for each of the categories. This was a little more time consuming to total scores, but I think gives the most representative results. We generally just vote for our favorite cookie in each category.

   Here are some templates:

   Cookie-Vote-Cards-Tree-Theme
   Cookie-Vote-Cards-Snowflake-Theme

   

7. Announce the Winners

   I always wrap the gifts and have each winner open the gift. Save the overall winner for last of course.