Holiday Party
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96 free Holiday Party trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Fifty free office holiday trivia questions with answers, built for the work party where not everyone celebrates the same thing. Alongside the office Christmas trivia staples (Secret Santa, ugly sweaters, eggnog, mistletoe and the Yule log) it covers Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Diwali and New Year's Eve customs from Spain to Chile, so every colleague gets a question they can win. The set is workplace-safe and mostly easy to medium, with a handful of harder ones (Saturnalia, Festivus, the Times Square ball's first drop) to separate the trivia champions from the rest of the team. Run it as a slideshow round at the holiday party, drop it into a virtual meeting, or play it solo online for a score you can share. Every answer was checked against an encyclopaedia or primary source, so you will not be arguing with the marketing department over a wrong answer key.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which holiday gift exchange does each guest draw one name and buy only for that person?
Secret Santa
Secret Santa is known in Germany as Wichteln, after the Wichtel, a sprite of Nordic folklore who does good deeds in secret.
Q 02Which creamy, nutmeg-topped holiday drink is often spiked with rum or brandy?
Eggnog
Eggnog once caused a riot: at West Point in 1826, cadets smuggled in whiskey to spike the Christmas batch, and the drunken night ended in courts-martial.
Q 03What festive plant with vibrant red and green leaves is a popular winter holiday decoration?
Poinsettia
Poinsettia's red 'petals' are really bracts, modified leaves that turn colour only after weeks of long, unbroken nights; the true flowers are the tiny yellow buds at the centre.
Q 04Which hot spiced holiday drink is named after an old toast meaning 'be in good health'?
Wassail
Wassail comes from the Old Norse toast 'ves heill', 'be healthy'; in England's cider country, wassailers also sing to the apple trees in midwinter to bring on a good harvest.
Q 05Which mid-December Roman festival is often cited as an influence on modern holiday gift-giving and feasting?
Saturnalia
Saturnalia began on 17 December and turned Rome upside down: slaves feasted like their masters, in some accounts waited on by them, and friends swapped candles and small figurines called sigillaria.
Q 06What type of holiday gathering typically involves guests bringing a dish to share with everyone?
Potluck
A potluck is a shared meal to which every guest brings a dish; the phrase 'pot luck' appears in English by 1592, meaning whatever food happened to be in the pot for an unexpected guest.
Q 07In Kwanzaa celebrations, what is the name of the holder for the seven candles?
Kinara
The kinara, Swahili for 'candle holder', carries one candle for each of Kwanzaa's seven principles; a new one is lit each day, starting with the centre candle.
Q 08Which fruit do Spaniards eat at each stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve for luck?
Grapes
Grapes, twelve of them, one per chime: Madrid papers record the custom in the 19th century, and Alicante growers are said to have pushed it in 1909 to shift a bumper harvest.
Q 09Which traditional Hanukkah-party game is played with a four-sided spinning top, often for chocolate coins?
Dreidel
Dreidel's four Hebrew letters tell each player what to do with the pot, take nothing, take it all, take half or pay in; they are popularly read as 'a great miracle happened there'.
Q 10Which intricate art form using colored powders or petals decorates entrances at Diwali?
Rangoli
Rangoli at the threshold is meant to welcome Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and good luck, into the home, and some designs include her footprints.
Q 11Whose business partner hand-wired the first electric Christmas tree lights, in a New York parlour in 1882?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison's partner Edward Johnson wound 80 hand-wired red, white and blue bulbs round a revolving tree at his New York home, at a time when trees were lit with candles.
Q 12Sweet-maker Tom Smith added a bang to wrapped bon-bons, creating which item?
Christmas cracker
The Christmas cracker bangs when two people pull it apart and a chemically treated strip snaps by friction; Smith is said to have got the idea from a log crackling on his fire.
Q 13At Scotland's Hogmanay, what name is given to the visitor who arrives just after midnight bearing coal, shortbread or whisky?
First-foot
Q 21In France, the guest who finds the charm baked into a galette des rois gets to wear what?
A paper crown
A paper crown comes with the cake for whoever finds the charm; to keep things fair, the youngest guest hides under the table and calls out who gets each slice.
Q 22What is the collective term for the South Asian sweets, such as ladoos and barfis, shared at Diwali?
Mithai
Mithai are as much a gift as a dessert: for Diwali they are made at home or bought, then shared with relatives, friends and neighbours along with the festival greeting.
Q 23Festivus, the anti-commercial holiday from a 1997 'Seinfeld' episode, swaps the Christmas tree for what?
An aluminum pole
The first-foot is thought to set the household's luck for the year, which is why a tall, dark-haired man is the caller most places hope for.
Q 14Which party game has guests swap amusing or impractical gifts, with the option of 'stealing' someone else's pick?
White Elephant
White Elephant takes its name from a tale that Siam's kings gave rare white elephants to courtiers who displeased them, a gift whose upkeep was ruinous.
Q 15What feast crowns Kwanzaa on December 31st?
Karamu
Karamu Ya Imani, the Feast of Faith, falls on 31 December, the sixth of Kwanzaa's seven days; celebrants share a libation from a common cup passed around the gathering.
Q 16Which jelly-filled fried doughnut is a traditional treat at Hanukkah parties?
Sufganiyot
Sufganiyot are deep-fried on purpose: Hanukkah foods cooked in oil recall the Temple oil that, in the holiday's story, burned for eight days instead of one.
Q 17New Year's fireworks trace back to which country, where exploding bamboo was burned to scare off evil spirits?
China
China: bamboo thrown on a fire bursts with a bang, and when gunpowder firecrackers arrived they kept the old name, which means 'exploding bamboo'.
Q 18Which French term names the small dishes served before a meal, usually eaten by hand while guests mingle?
Hors d'oeuvres
Hors d'oeuvres literally means 'outside the work': the bites stand apart from the ordinary courses of a meal, and English borrowed the phrase in the early 1700s.
Q 19Who composed the Christmas Eve ballet 'The Nutcracker'?
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky came across a newly invented instrument, the celesta, in Paris and asked his publisher to get one; its bell-like chime became the voice of the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Q 20What decorative strand of interwoven leaves or flowers is often wrapped around a Christmas tree or draped on a mantel?
Garland
A garland can also seal a marriage: at Hindu weddings the bride and groom place flower garlands on each other to show they accept one another.
An aluminum pole, left bare, was the writers' touch, as was the date, December 23: the real O'Keefe family Festivus used a clock in a bag nailed to the wall.
Q 24Which fried potato pancakes, served with applesauce or sour cream, are a Hanukkah staple?
Latkes
Latkes are thought to have begun as fried cheese pancakes; the potato took over only once it became a staple crop in Eastern Europe.
Q 25Which German-speaking gift-bringer did Martin Luther promote in place of Saint Nicholas?
Christkindl
Christkindl means 'Christ Child'; Martin Luther promoted the Child as gift-bringer to draw Protestants away from Saint Nicholas, moving the gifts from the saint's feast day to Christmas Eve.
Q 26Times Square's ball copies the time balls once dropped daily so who could set their clocks?
Ships' captains
Ships' captains: Greenwich began dropping a ball at one o'clock each afternoon in 1833 so crews on the Thames could set their chronometers, and New York borrowed the idea for New Year's Eve 1907.
Q 27The tradition of kissing under which plant is a well-known holiday party custom?
Mistletoe
Kissing under the mistletoe caught on among servants in eighteenth-century England; in one version of the custom each kiss cost a berry, and when the berries were gone the kissing stopped.
Q 28Danes see in the New Year with champagne and which tower of stacked almond-cake rings?
Kransekage
Kransekage is a cone of baked almond-paste rings stuck together with white icing; for weddings the same rings are built into a horn of plenty and filled with sweets.
Q 29Which spice of holiday baking and mulled drinks is the dried inner bark of a tree?
Cinnamon
Cinnamon is peeled from Cinnamomum trees in strips that curl up as they dry, forming the quills that gave the spice names meaning 'little tube' in several languages.
Q 30What activity at holiday parties involves teams acting out words or phrases without speaking?
Charades
Charades began in 18th-century France as a written riddle about each syllable of a word; the acted version, in which players mime the syllables in turn, took over in 19th-century parlours.