News writer; Opinion columnist
Whether you call it White Elephant, Yankee Swap, or Dirty Santa, gift exchanges that let you steal someone else’s present are a great way to receive inconsequential gifts while infuriating your relatives.
If you've never participated, each person brings a wrapped gift, typically $25 or less, which goes into a pool everyone can choose from. An order is established, and as each person selects and opens a gift, they have two options: keep their present or ‘steal’ someone else’s and give them the present they just opened.
Usually, this results in hurt feelings, trash talk, and some laughs when your aunt steals the cookie-cutter set your mom opened and leaves her holding a pair of oven mitts.
Lottery tickets are a popular gift at these kinds of exchanges, and while most of them end up losers, every once in a while, someone trades up for a jackpot.
These are true stories of people who won big lottery prizes at holiday gift exchanges.
A half-million-dollar flashlight
When Indiana resident Emily Hickox unwrapped a flashlight at her family’s 2024 White Elephant gift exchange, we can only imagine she felt pretty underwhelmed. After all, the 25-year-old grew up in an era when pretty much everyone had a high-powered light on their cell phone. That’s also why it's not surprising that after the exchange, she had no problem trading the flashlight back to its original owner in exchange for a Michigan Lottery Detroit Lions instant win ticket.
"My cousin purchased the ticket for the white elephant gift exchange at our family Christmas party," Hickox told state lottery officials. "My dad actually won the ticket in the gift exchange, and I won the gift he brought, a flashlight. He wanted his gift back, so we made an agreement after the game to trade gifts."
There’s no word on whether her dad regrets the exchange, but he could have purchased a lot of flashlights for the prize under the ticket he gave up.
“I scratched the ticket off on Christmas, which also happens to be my birthday, and thought I won $50,000.”
Hickox wasn’t a frequent lottery player, so she double-checked the ticket on the state lottery app, and the results showed she was in for the best birthday of her life.
“I downloaded the Michigan Lottery app and created an account to check the ticket on the app scanner. I was expecting to see $50,000, so when I saw the extra zero, I was speechless! I couldn’t comprehend that I’d just won $500,000!”
Certainly a better birthday/Christmas gift than the pair of socks her Aunt Darlene knitted for her.
Hickox had to wait until after the holidays to travel to the Michigan Lottery offices to collect her check. She told officials that she planned to use the money to buy a new car, invest, and share some with her family.
She just wanted some new shoes
Lori Janes was thrilled when she unwrapped a $25 TJ Maxx gift card during a Christmas office party gift exchange. The Kentucky dental office manager was a fan of the store, and she imagined what she might pick up there when one of her coworkers decided to steal it.
Stung by the loss of the gift she wanted, Janes decided to grab a handful of lottery scratch-offs from a different coworker because, under their office white elephant rules, once a gift was stolen, it couldn’t be taken a second time.
“Once it got to me, it was done, and mine to keep. That’s when everyone was telling me to scratch them off,” Janes told reporters.
The Kentucky resident pulled out a quarter and uncovered the tickets, and everyone cheered when she won $50 on the first game. She kept going and scratched her second game, a $10 Hit the Jackpot Ticket.
She uncovered a prize symbol on all fifteen of the game’s spots, which meant she won the top prize of $175,000. Janes explained:
“Everyone was going insane. People were getting their calculators out and double-checking. A couple of people even scanned the ticket on the lottery’s app, just to make sure. I couldn’t believe it. It was a $25 gift exchange, and I won $175,000!”
Janes said she doesn’t normally play the lottery, so when she called her family to report the big news, they were slow to believe her at first.
“We figured she didn’t look at it right, but then we heard people in the background celebrating; it became real,” her husband told lottery officials.
Janes didn’t waste any time redeeming her ticket and traveled with her husband and two children to the state lottery offices immediately after the party. After taxes were withheld, she collected a check for $124,250.
“This is so crazy. I’m truly blessed,” she said.
She said that she mostly planned to use the money to pay off bills, including her daughter’s college tuition and the loans on her family’s cars.
Secret fortune
The only thing better than starting your day with a hot cup of coffee is starting it with the coffee and a lottery fortune.
Ontario resident Jennifer Lafleur was easing into her Christmas break in December 2021 when she decided to check the Instant Merry and Bright lottery tickets she won in a Secret Santa gift exchange.
“I got home from work to start my Christmas holidays and relaxed with a coffee and my ticket,” the 41-year-old married mother told lottery officials.
Her pulse raced when she uncovered the ticket and saw an instant win prize symbol on one of the squares.
“I noticed I won on the second game — my heart started pounding! I thought it was going to come out of my chest.”
It turns out her office gift was a jackpot winner worth $250,000. LaFleur was so shocked she wasn’t sure if she had really won. She texted her husband at work and told him to come home to look at the ticket:
“I passed him [her husband] the ticket, and he asked if it was real, then gave me a big hug. My heart is filled with pure joy.”
When it comes to her plans for the winnings, she stated:
“I plan to put some towards my mortgage and set some aside for my children’s education. I’d also like to invest and save some for a family vacation – I have lots of decisions to make!”
LaFleur added that she planned to use the money to pay down her mortgage and for her children’s education.
Christmas Eve jackpot
Santa’s bag must have been overflowing with cash when he went down Edisson Garcia Vargas’s chimney on Christmas Eve.
The North Carolina resident was with his family, sharing in a gift-exchange tradition before he unwrapped the ultimate Christmas present.
“We had a big bowl of gifts that we took turns unwrapping,” he said. “That lottery ticket was the only thing I got out of there.”
He said his girlfriend kissed him for luck before he scratched the $5 More Money ticket that a relative purchased at the Harris Teeter in Clayton, North Carolina.
The raucous family party quickly grew quiet when they saw the symbols that Vargas uncovered.
“Everybody was just in shock with their mouths open,” he told state lottery officials.
The last present left in the bowl was a winner worth $200,000. “I was so excited when I saw how much I won,” Vargas added. “The whole family was.”
He drove down to lottery headquarters to pick up his prize, and after paying taxes, he took home a check worth $142,501.
When asked how he planned to spend the money, Vargas said he mainly planned to invest it.
Promises, promises
It’s no secret that money can change relationships, and once close friends Brenda White and Franco Sapia are no exception.
The two New Hampshire residents attended a White Elephant party on December 15, 2007, in Haverhill, MA. Unhappy with her own gift, White decided to steal the $5 scratch-off ticket Sapia unwrapped.
Sapia wasn’t happy to see his ticket go, and according to partygoers, White told him that if she won a prize, she would share it with him. Given that most tickets are worthless, it was probably an easy promise to make at the time.
White uncovered the ticket and saw, to her astonishment, that it was worth $200,000. Rather than hold up her end of the deal and offer Sapia half her winnings, White took off, and Sapia claims that he never saw a dime from his suddenly wealthy friend.
Rather than shrug off the loss, Sapia sued for the money he claims is rightfully his, and the judge put a hold on the entire payout until he could sort out who was entitled to what.
For the parsimonious White, the name of the ticket she won was extremely appropriate: Bah Hum Bucks.
Snowflake
When a Baltimore man abruptly left a Christmas party, it wasn’t because he was trying to be rude, but because he needed to verify if he had just received the world’s greatest stocking stuffer.
The man, who chose to remain anonymous, went to a friend’s annual Christmas party with his wife. He was only looking for a night of laughter and good cheer and didn’t think much of it when his friend gave him and his wife lottery tickets as a gift.
“Our good friend gave each of us a ticket as a gift,” the man told lottery officials. “Mine was a Snowflake Triple scratch-off. I waited until my wife struck out with hers, then I started scratching.”
He didn’t believe it when he uncovered the first square and saw that it matched for a $10,000 prize. He believed it even less when he uncovered the remaining nine squares and saw that each of them matched for a $10,000 win.
“I didn’t believe it. Just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said.
Apparently, no one else at the party believed it either because he showed his ticket to the host, who gave it to him and his wife, and neither of them thought it was really a winner. The man left the party, went to a nearby convenience store, and verified it on the ticket scanner.
Only then did he truly believe he had won $100,000.
“When I got back to the party,” he told Maryland Lottery officials, “The celebration went up a few notches.”
Let's hope he got a great Christmas present for the friend who gave him the ticket.
