Fun Holiday Gift Ideas for Students
Holiday gift ideas are on your mind as you come up to the end of November and start of December. Whether you are spending Christmas away from home for the first time or you are heading back to see friends and family, you’ll want to make sure that you have sorted all your Christmas and holiday present buying well in advance of the big day.
There are some fun holiday gift ideas for students to please all ages, for friends the same age as you through to gifts to entertain the entire family during the holiday season, whether you celebrate Christmas or not.
Secret Santa and gift giving ideas
Choosing who you want to buy a gift for this holiday season isn’t always straightforward. If you are in a small course at university, have a tight group of friends, or you have a part-time job, you might want to buy gifts for people you know but there are just too many people.
This is where something like Secret Santa is a lot of fun! Secret Santa is a traditional game around Christmas where a group of friends, family members, or co-workers draw names randomly from the group and become another person’s Secret Santa for that year. Whether on a physical piece of paper or performed digitally, names are drawn randomly, and a budget is set (usually this is around £10-£15 to ensure smaller, fun gifts are bought), and a date is put down for when you all come together to give each other gifts, and maybe have a meal and drinks around the celebration. On the day an extra game might be played where you each try to guess who bought your gift.
An example of a fun and cosy Secret Santa gift for under a tenner is the Homer Simpson slipper socks from Primark, providing you the ultimate slip-free and warm feet around the home with the comic face of Homer Simpson clear to everyone!
Fun holiday gift ideas for friends
Buying gifts for your friends should find that balance between being a fun thing and a gift idea that shows you really care about them. We’ve tried to balance these two ideas with the gifts we’ve put together for you here.
The first is for your friend with the sweet tooth. A custom bag of pick ‘n’ mix is a fantastic way to get some modern and retro sweets together in a bag that makes your friend smile and gives them that extra energy boost and treat to help them get through the next late night revision session! Another idea with this is to go with giant bags of pick ‘n’ mix to share with a friend or small group of friends (you want to make sure there is enough to go round though!).
Another idea for holiday gifts is to buy a custom-made photo frame for friends. They can be funny, have a heartfelt message or whatever message you choose for the frame itself, but the idea is that you can print the photos of you and your friends that are your favourite and frame them so that they are always there on show, rather than just hidden away with thousands of other photos on your phone.
Fun holiday gift ideas for the family
Spending the holidays at home with the family brings with it some stresses and challenges after you’ve been used to your independence at university. It’s easy to get caught up in family drama, and even if it’s a calm household, scrolling on Tik Tok or spending time on laptops and phones, rather than quality time with each other is always a danger. One way to bring the whole family together and to have some fun is to play some holiday board games.
That Escalated Quickly is a fun card game for all the family where you must work together to put absurd things in the correct order, it is full of energy, very funny, and is so addictive that it’s hard to stop once you’re a few rounds in. It’s a creative game where players are assigned a number, and each give an answer to a simple question with the intensity of the answer based on the number they’ve been assigned.
An example of a question is “I’m daydreaming in class. What am I dreaming about?” with number 1 being the least satisfying dream and number 10 being the most satisfying dream. The person dealing must decide which answers are the best, organising the cards in order of preference and see if they have got it right! Ideal for larger groups and families, you’ll be amazed at some of the answers that come out when a player is desperate to win!
Another popular board game for the upcoming holiday season is Outsmarted. This is a trivia board game made for the modern age and blows Trivial Pursuit out of the water with questions that are actually from this century!
You can choose to play remotely, choose your own categories, play for points instead of pieces and make it suit your table. It’s a roll, move, and answer questions and answer game played with two to six groups of players (up to 24 players in total). The gameplay is fast and a lot of fun, gets your brain working and as you’d expect there will be a lot of laughs with the family.
Budget in advance of Christmas
We’ve tried to help you out in the past with the best budgeting tips and apps to help students budget. It is very important to us that we help you transition into student life, where you’ll be responsible for creating and living on a budget and not overstretching your finances during the year.
This stands you in good stead for times like Christmas, when you might want to spend a little bit extra on holiday gift ideas for your friends and family or you might want to go out for dinner before the university break with course mates and friends. Saving up in advance, within your budget, helps to take the pressure off when the holidays come around and won’t leave you in trouble should you spend the money that you want to.
Have you already decided on the holiday gift ideas you’re following through with and purchasing this Christmas? Are you doing a Secret Santa gift-giving day with your university friends? Let us know how you plan for Christmas gifts at university and for friends and family back home. It’s a joyous and exciting time of year and we can’t wait to hear all about your own holiday gift ideas!
If you are looking for accommodation for the next year, then you are in the right place. Visit our Urban Student Life website and browse through a range of properties all across the UK. We are sure you will find something that caters to all your needs!
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