Christmas Cracker
Christmas Cracker is a name learning exercise for relationship mapping: it helps participants build useful connections and understand how people, roles, or ideas relate.
How to run it
- Resources Needed - enough Christmas Crackers for each participant and for course facilitators to have one each.
- Make sure everyone in the room has a Christmas cracker.
- Explain that you will be asking participants to pair up in a moment. When they pair up you will ask them to introduce themselves to each other by giving their name, department, job role and any other information you want them to exchange.
- Say that you then want them to pull their Christmas crackers and put on their novelty hat. They should then read the riddle, motto or joke to their partner.
- Finally, ask them to tell the other person what is the best or worst ever Christmas present they have ever had (and why). Alternatively you could ask them to say what Christmas present they would buy (and who for) if money was no object.
- Keep going until all participants have spoken to each other or after a few goes if the group is too large to allow this. Make sure you join in the activity yourself as this will help to maintain the Christmas spirit.
- Some festive background music works well whilst this activity is underway.
Run this exercise live
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What participants need now
Materials:
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Prompts to use +
Resources Needed - enough Christmas Crackers for each participant and for course facilitators to have one each.
Explain that you will be asking participants to pair up in a moment. When they pair up you will ask them to introduce themselves to each other by giving their name, department, job role and any other information you want them to exchange.
Say that you then want them to pull their Christmas crackers and put on their novelty hat. They should then read the riddle, motto or joke to their partner.
Finally, ask them to tell the other person what is the best or worst ever Christmas present they have ever had (and why). Alternatively you could ask them to say what Christmas present they would buy (and who for) if money was no object.
Keep going until all participants have spoken to each other or after a few goes if the group is too large to allow this. Make sure you join in the activity yourself as this will help to maintain the Christmas spirit.
Run this with your AI assistant +
Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own local model: paste this prompt and your AI will co-facilitate this exercise with you.
Adapt this exercise for my exact room. Exercise: Christmas Cracker. Readiness: Publishable Draft. Core moves: Resources Needed - enough Christmas Crackers for each participant and for course facilitators to have one each.; Explain that you will be asking participants to pair up in a moment. When they pair up you will ask them to introduce themselves to each other by giving their name, department, job role and any other information you want them to exchange.; Say that you then want them to pull their Christmas crackers and put on their novelty hat. They should then read the riddle, motto or joke to their partner.; Finally, ask them to tell the other person what is the best or worst ever Christmas present they have ever had (and why). Alternatively you could ask them to say what Christmas present they would buy (and who for) if money was no object.. Return a concise facilitator script with timing, wording, safety notes, and remote/in-person adjustments.
Origin unverified
- Where we observed it: The current corpus has one observed source organization: TrainerBubble. (1 source observed, including TrainerBubble.)
- What that means: we track where an exercise has been observed in public sources. We do not claim to know who created it, or how popular it is.
- No efficacy claims: appearing in this library is not a claim that the exercise is proven effective. Facilitator judgment and context decide whether it works for a given room.
- Corrections: if you have evidence of an earlier or more accurate source, read our methodology and trust boundary and tell us.