Dirty Santa Book Swap

Last year our TAG group came up with a great idea for a Dirty Santa Book Swap program for December. This year we did it again.

  This program is incredibly low maintenance and that may be why it's one of my favorites.We ask that teens bring in one of their own beloved books from home to exchange for something new to read. Some kids choose to bring mix CDs as well as books and that's totally fine! Alot of teens even bring several books to give away - not just one.

The game is usually very quick and we just go around the room until all the books are gone.

This year, the teen program followed one of our kids program where we showed a movie and made crafts from Popsicle sticks, so the leftover craft supplies were brought over from that program.

No idea why this is sideways....

The teens at our library LOVE glitter and sequins, so anytime those can be incorporated into a craft is usually a huge plus imo.

But I can't forget to mention the big hit of the program, which was the Hot Chocolate Bar!

Amazon offers a set of seven different flavors which was bought, which included Smores, Pumpkin Spice, Chocolate Supreme, Caramel, Raspberry, Arctic White and French Vanilla. In this package there were 6 packages of each flavor so we were set. Walmart also had various flavors available such as Mint and chocolate, Cinnamon and chocolate, Butterscotch and chocolate, etc. Who knew there were SO MANY different hot chocolate flavors out there??


I opted to try the Arctic White first which surprisingly was very bland and disappointing. French Vanilla was the crowd favorite and only one girl was brave enough to try raspberry.

Because our community room where we have our programs does not have access to a sink (those are in the bathrooms and staff area downstairs) we needed a way to have hot water. Cue coffee pot. It took a little more effort than if we had had access to a microwave, but this worked out fine. It just had to have water added to it regularly since it's not a full-sized coffee pot.

Buying the hot cocoa and marshmallows was literally the only expense for this program. Next year, if we choose to do this again, I may run to the local thrift store or the book sale room and try to purchase a couple good book titles and fluff up the table though. Not that we didn't have some great titles, I think people are just hesitant to bring books they really enjoy to give away.