Detroit Secret Santa and White Elephant Gifts for the Office

A lot of office gift exchanges go the same way. The cap is $25, half the room shops the night before, and the table fills up with candles, generic mugs and gift cards to a chain restaurant. Nobody is upset. Nobody remembers it either.

A theme fixes most of that. Tell people everything in the pile has to be made, sold or started in Detroit, and the shopping gets easier because the list gets shorter. The gifts also get better, because a $13 jar of pickles from a Detroit company says more than a $13 candle from a big-box store.

Below are ideas at two common caps, $25 and $50, with prices taken from each maker's own site in the first week of October 2026. Check before you buy. Holiday prices move.

Pick the format before the cap

Secret Santa and white elephant are different games, and the right gift depends on which one you're playing.

In Secret Santa, everyone draws a name and buys for one person. You can shop for that person's taste: the coworker who puts hot sauce on everything, the one with a desk full of plants.

In a white elephant (some offices call it a Yankee swap or a Dirty Santa), nobody knows who ends up with what. People take turns picking a wrapped gift from the pile or stealing one that's already been opened. You're buying for the whole room, so the gift has to appeal to almost anyone.

A few house rules keep a white elephant moving. Cap steals at three per gift, after which it's locked to whoever holds it. Don't let anyone steal back a gift that was just taken from them in the same turn. Have the first person go again at the end, since they never got a chance to steal. Set the cap in writing, and tell people to take the price tag off.

Ideas at $25

A jar and a bag. McClure's lists every 16-ounce jar at $13, including the spicy spears and the Bloody Mary mix. The company says it moved all its manufacturing to Michigan in 2009. Pair a jar with an 8-ounce Germack snack mix from Eastern Market ($5.99) and the total comes to about $19. Germack, in business since 1924, sells from 2509 Russell St.

Six chocolates. Bon Bon Bon's Mixed Box of Bons starts at $21 for the smallest box. The company started in 2014 and runs shops in Midtown and downtown Detroit. For a white elephant, chocolate is about as safe as it gets. People will steal it.

A Pewabic tile. Pewabic, the Detroit pottery that dates to 1903, sells a 3-by-3-inch pinecone tile for $24, and its honeybee, ginkgo and honeycomb tiles are the same price. It's a piece of Detroit pottery for less than the cap, and it's small enough for a desk. Pewabic's $2 gift box brings it to $26, so ask the organizer if packaging counts.

Hot sauce for the Secret Santa who likes heat. Hell Fire Detroit bottles run $13 to $16 for the mild-to-hot range. Two of them come to about $28 in the company's own Hot Box #3. If your cap is strict, buy one bottle and add a Germack mix.

A City Bird gift card. The Midtown shop at 460 W. Canfield sells gift cards online from $10. Load it with $25 and the recipient can walk in and pick out a Michigan mug or a card for someone else. Gift cards do poorly in white elephants (nobody steals an envelope), so save this one for Secret Santa.

Ideas at $50

A box that does the assembly for you. Our Half box is $49 for four picks, one each from any four of our five shelves: pop, salty, sweet, pantry and a keepsake. Faygo Rock & Rye, Better Made chips, Sanders hot fudge and a jar of McClure's pickles is one way to fill it. It ships ready to open with a handwritten card, and prices never go inside the box.

A tile and chocolates. The Pewabic Detroit Skyline Tile is $29. Add a six-piece Bon Bon Bon box, from $21, and you're at about $50. That pairing works in a white elephant because it reads as two gifts once it's unwrapped.

A Bloody Mary kit, minus the vodka. McClure's Bloody Mary mix ($13), a jar of McClure's spicy spears ($13) and a bottle of Hell Fire Detroit ($13 to $16) land around $40. Leave the liquor out of anything going to an office party. Plenty of workplaces have rules about it, and not everyone at the table drinks.

A Pewabic Rocks Cup. It's $48 on Pewabic's site and it's the kind of thing people don't buy for themselves.

What survives the steal round

A few things make a gift worth stealing.

They make sense the moment the paper comes off. A box of chocolates gets a reaction from across the room. A gift that needs a two-minute explanation gets a polite nod and stays put.

They can be shared. Food that can be opened right there at the party gets passed around, and the person holding it becomes popular for ten minutes. That's when the steals start.

They don't come in sizes. Skip T-shirts and hats in an exchange. Somebody always ends up with a small when they wear an XL.

They have a story. "These pickles are from Detroit" or "this pottery has been around since 1903" gives the person who opens it something to say. Write that line on a small card and tape it to the gift.

Skip gag gifts that are funny for one laugh, anything scented and anything that needs batteries. Those tend to go home with whoever was stuck with them.

Remote coworkers and big teams

Hybrid offices run into a logistics problem: half the team is at home. A shipped gift solves it, as long as the exchange happens on a video call after everything arrives. Set the party date first, then work backward from shipping deadlines. Our shipping section has the order-by dates for this season.

If the company is buying for everyone instead of running an exchange, that's a different job. Our corporate gifts page covers orders of five boxes or more, with your logo on a printed card at no charge and each box shipped to its own address on the week you choose.

Whatever you buy, take the price sticker off. A $24 Pewabic tile still came out of a Detroit kiln.