day 22 – Planning a Cookie Exchange: Rules

so, you are planning a cookie exchange! i love planning parties so much, have you enjoyed our past twenty some days of planning parties? this is like my season. i love the fall weather, i get to host non-stop parties and celebrations. it's just so my heart-throb. anywho, we are going to talk cookie exchange rules today...

31 days of party planning hosting a cookie exchange with the creative jayne2

i mentioned this book before (which i will be giving a copy away soon - stay tuned!!!):

a very merry cookie party in how to host a cookie exchange by the creative jayne

in the book there is a planning and hosting section, cookies to build a party around section and cookies by technique section. when i first began planning the exchange i went through all of the things that COULD go wrong with it. i started pinning cookie exchange ideas and THEN i went to my book.

the very first section under planning and hosting is "Cookie Exchange Rules." duh, rules eliminate a lot of potential problems! ok, so how do you make rules for a cookie exchange?

first, decide on types of cookies. do you want people to bring plane jane chocolate chip? do you want ten people to bring sugar cookies? you get to decide if you want to allow duplicate kinds or not.

can people purchase cookies to bring? can one person bring store-bought cookies or do you want to do a swap of everyone's store-bought cookies?

how many cookies do you bring? last year when we hosted we chose to have people pre-package cookies in groups of 6 unless they were smaller than a regular cookie, then in 12s. that way, with only 10 or so people you'd only have to make 60-ish cookies.

disclose your type of cookie up front. when you do allow duplicate cookies you take the risk of someone feeling belittled because such and such's cookie was 10 times what your's was or hers was so much prettier...if you have people let you know before hand you can make sure that you don't have duplicate cookies.

should they come pre-packaged? or do you want to supply packaging materials as an activity? or do you just want people to load up and head home with a heap of cookies? that didn't sound very pretty but in reality it's just as good as any other option. :) we decided to make a game of our packaging and we had people bring the cookies pre-packaged and we voted on the best packaging, tastiest cookie, most unique and so on.

there are things that i will do differently this year. we had a little bit of confusion about who took what cookie and she missed those cookies and so on, no conflict, just left-over confusion for us. i will hand out cookies individually this year, meaning i will walk around with each kind and hand one to each lady. if she doesn't want it then i will just move past her with that particular kind. at the end, if someone passed up a kind she can choose from remaining ones if there are left overs.

another thing that we did that i really liked was, when we ended up having extra packages of cookie,s we chose to bless two families that didn't have the time to do a lot of baking and give them the remaining packages. what is a christmas cookie party if you can't bless someone else during the holidays?

are there rules that you would add? have you been to a party that you didn't particularly like the rules of, what were they?


  1. I love that you gave the leftovers to a family that couldn't participate! So generous!

  2. it was fun! we weren't expecting leftovers so it was exciting to be able to bless someone else with them!