In this article, you’ll find Christmas contest and competition ideas for brands, with real examples showing different ways to generate engagement, collect leads, promote products, drive visits, and reward your audience.
Christmas Contest and Competition Ideas
From simple giveaways to creative challenges, games, quizzes, and multi-day campaigns, there are plenty of ways to turn Christmas into an interactive experience. Here are some Christmas contest and competition ideas, with real examples showing how brands and organizations have adapted different promotional mechanics to their audiences and objectives.
Run a Christmas Giveaway
A giveaway is one of the simplest ways to add a prize incentive to your Christmas campaign. You can use your own products as the prize, create a festive bundle, offer an experience, or partner with another brand. Participation can take place on social media or through a dedicated promotion, depending on where you want to reach your audience.
Austroflamm, an Austrian manufacturer of fireplaces and stoves, put one of its own products at the center of its Christmas giveaway. The brand offered a Fynn Xtra fireplace as the prize and promoted the giveaway through several posts across Instagram and Facebook. The product’s connection with warmth and the winter season made it a particularly natural fit for a Christmas campaign.
If social media is your main participation channel, explore our 9 Social Media Christmas Giveaway Ideas for Brands for more examples and ways to structure your campaign.
Collect User-Generated Content with a Christmas Contest
Christmas gives your audience plenty of material to create. A user-generated content contest can invite participants to share photos, videos, drawings, recipes, decorations, or other original content around a festive theme. The key is to choose a concept that makes sense for your particular audience rather than simply asking for generic Christmas content.
Mallén Ganadería, a livestock-focused brand in the Dominican Republic, did exactly that with its Navidad en el Campo Christmas photo contest. Participants submitted Christmas-themed pictures of their farms or livestock operations. The approved entries were displayed in a public gallery, where users could vote for their favorites, and the three most-voted entries won livestock equipment.
The example shows how even a highly specialized audience can become the basis for a distinctive Christmas competition. Start with something your customers already care about, then find the festive angle that connects it to your campaign.
For more inspiration involving photo submissions, galleries, voting, and different winner-selection methods, see our Christmas Photo Contests: Ideas, Examples, and Tips for Your Campaign.
Challenge Your Audience with a Christmas Quiz
A Christmas competition can also test what your audience knows. A quiz adds an element of challenge to participation and gives you the opportunity to build questions around Christmas, your products, your industry, or a subject your community already cares about.
The Bon Scott Holiday Giveaway used a Knowledge Quiz during Christmas as part of the participation experience. Participants completed the quiz for the chance to win prizes including a Bon Scott Heritage Tartan denim vest, a Bon Scott work shirt, and a store gift card.
A Christmas quiz can work particularly well when your brand has an established community or a subject that lends itself to trivia. Instead of simply asking users to register for a prize, you can turn participation itself into an opportunity for them to interact with content related to your brand.
Turn Your Christmas Contest into a Branded Game
Games give participants a more active role in a Christmas campaign. Instead of completing a conventional entry form, users interact with branded content, earn points, and can be rewarded either for taking part or for their performance.
+Vision, an optical retail chain in Mexico, created a Christmas Falling Objects game in which participants had to catch objects as quickly as possible. After playing, users registered to receive their reward and see their position in the ranking. Everyone who played received a 30% discount coupon, while participants also had the opportunity to win a pair of sunglasses.
Ópticas Lux, an eyewear retailer in Mexico, took the competitive element further with a Christmas-themed Slide & Match game. Participants combined festive elements to earn points, with everyone who completed the experience receiving an MXN 800 coupon. The five participants at the top of the ranking also received MXN 6,000 gift cards.
These examples show two ways to structure rewards around a Christmas game. You can give everyone an incentive for participating while adding a prize opportunity, or make performance more important by reserving higher-value rewards for the players who achieve the best scores.
Put Your Products at the Center of a Creative Christmas Competition
If your products lend themselves to creative use or display, make them part of the challenge itself. This can encourage customers to interact with your products while generating content that shows them in real-world settings.
RETIF, a European retailer specializing in equipment and supplies for businesses, invited customers to participate in its Christmas Window Display Voting Contest. Participants created a festive window display featuring at least one RETIF product and the campaign’s official poster, then submitted a photo of their creation.
For a B2B brand such as RETIF, the concept connected Christmas creativity directly with how customers use its products in their own businesses. The same idea can be adapted to other sectors by challenging customers to decorate, display, prepare, style, or otherwise use a product as part of their Christmas entry.
Get Creative with a Christmas Writing Competition
Not every online Christmas contest needs to revolve around photos, games, or giveaways. Writing, drawing, and other creative challenges can give participants more freedom to contribute something original and can be particularly suitable for campaigns aimed at families and communities.
El Boulevard, a shopping center in Spain, invited participants to take part in The Christmas Tale, a short-story competition built around a predefined opening line. Participants continued the story in their own words, and the submitted Christmas tales were displayed online for the community to discover and vote on.
A writing contest can be adapted to different audiences and levels of participation. You could ask for a Christmas story, a message to Santa, a festive memory, or another short creative response related to your campaign theme.
Run a Christmas Competition at Work
Christmas competitions aren’t only for customers. They can also become part of an internal campaign, virtual Christmas party, or end-of-year activity designed for employees and professional communities.
Roxer Communication, a communications agency in Hungary, turned a familiar agency scenario into a Christmas-themed Tap Tap game. Players had 40 seconds to complete an urgent “SOS brief” before the Christmas break, tapping helpful objects such as coffee, headphones, and Post-it notes while avoiding client phone calls and unexpected budget cuts that could wipe out their points.
The concept shows how a Christmas competition at work can be tailored to situations and humor that participants recognize from their professional lives rather than relying on a generic festive challenge.
Another option is to make content creation part of the experience. With Easypromos PhotoFun, for example, you can invite employees to take or upload a photo and personalize it with festive frames, stickers, and other branded elements as part of a virtual Christmas party or internal campaign.
Try this Christmas PhotoFun demo to see how you could create a virtual Christmas photo booth for your employees or audience.
Keep Participants Coming Back with a Christmas Advent Calendar
A Christmas contest doesn’t have to take place on a single day. An Advent Calendar or countdown campaign can reveal new prizes, games, quizzes, content, or participation opportunities over several days, giving users a reason to return throughout the campaign.
Berry Recruitment, a UK recruitment agency, used this approach for a 12-day Digital Advent Calendar aimed specifically at employers and hiring managers. The campaign ran from December 11 to 22, with participants registering to take part and winners selected afterward through random drawings.
The example shows how the 12 Days of Christmas format can work for B2B audiences as well as consumer campaigns. Different days can reveal giveaways, games, quizzes, coupons, exclusive content, or a combination of mechanics, creating multiple opportunities to engage participants throughout the Christmas period.
How Do You Choose the Right Christmas Contest?
The best Christmas contest format depends on your campaign objective, the type of participation you want to encourage, and how much you want to ask of your audience. A simple giveaway may be enough when your priority is reach and participation, while games, quizzes, creative contests, and multi-day campaigns can support more specific objectives.
Consider what you want the campaign to achieve:
- Generate participation with a simple mechanic: Run a giveaway with a relevant prize and straightforward entry requirements.
- Collect user-generated content: Ask participants to submit photos, videos, drawings, recipes, stories, or other content related to your Christmas theme.
- Capture leads: Use a registration-based contest, quiz, or game to collect participant data and the corresponding marketing consent.
- Promote your products: Make your products part of the prize, challenge, questions, or creative concept so that participation also gives them visibility.
- Create a more interactive brand experience: Use a game or quiz that participants actively complete rather than simply registering or commenting.
- Encourage competition: Add a score or ranking and reward the participants who perform best.
- Connect an offline experience with digital participation: Use QR codes to give customers access to a contest, game, or voting campaign from a store, event, Christmas market, or other physical location.
- Generate repeat engagement: Create an Advent Calendar, 12 Days of Christmas campaign, or other multi-day promotion that gives participants reasons to return.
You can also combine several of these objectives in the same campaign. As some of the examples above show, a Christmas game can collect registrations, provide an immediate coupon, and reward the highest-scoring participants, while a creative contest can generate user content and add a public voting phase.
The important thing is to choose the participation mechanic because it supports what you want to achieve, rather than adding complexity simply to make the campaign feel more elaborate.
Looking for more Christmas campaign inspiration? Explore our Christmas Campaign Hub for more ideas, interactive promotions, games, and ready-to-try demos for the holiday season.
Christmas Contest and Competition FAQs
Good Christmas contest ideas include social media giveaways, photo and user-generated content contests, quizzes, branded games, creative competitions, voting campaigns, and Advent Calendars. The best option depends on whether you want to generate participation, collect leads, promote products, encourage repeat engagement, or achieve another specific marketing objective.
Christmas competitions for work can include festive quizzes, games with rankings, photo challenges, creative contests, and virtual Christmas party activities. You can also tailor the concept to your employees or industry. Roxer Communication, for example, turned familiar agency situations into a Christmas Tap Tap game where participants completed a last-minute “SOS brief” before the holiday break.
Yes. A Christmas contest hosted on its own promotional microsite can be shared through your website, email campaigns, social media, QR codes, and other online or offline channels. This is particularly useful when you want to collect participant data or create an experience that goes beyond the features available directly on a social network.
Yes. A Christmas campaign can combine games, quizzes, giveaways, coupons, voting, or other mechanics depending on the experience you want to create. A multi-day format such as an Advent Calendar can also give participants access to different activities or rewards on different days.
Have a Christmas contest campaign in mind? Contact us via live chat or request a video call to discuss your ideas. We’ll be happy to help you choose the right promotion for your audience and objectives.
