The 13 Best Holiday Season Contest Prizes
Running a contest or giveaway this holiday season? Read about the best prize ideas from these 13 examples.
Updated: October 27, 2026
The holiday season is a great time for running contests and giveaways. Your customers are hunting for deals and primed to spend big on gifts or treat themselves. Giveaways help you attract leads in preparation for this spending spree.
Plus, the holiday season is a time for giving, generosity, and being thankful for others. So why not reward your customers with a prize?
But before you pick one, think about who you want it to attract. The prize you choose decides who enters your contest. A prize everyone wants, like cash or a vacation, will bring in a flood of entries, but plenty of those entrants will be people who enter every giveaway they see and have no real interest in your business. A prize tied closely to what you sell will bring in fewer entries, but they’ll be people who are much more likely to become customers.
Ask yourself three questions:
- What’s my goal? If you want maximum reach and brand awareness, a broad-appeal prize can make sense. If you want qualified leads you can sell to, stick close to your own products and services.
- What’s my budget? Include shipping, taxes, and fulfillment, not just the prize itself.
- When does the winner need it? A Thanksgiving prize that arrives after Thanksgiving isn’t much of a prize.
With that in mind, here are 13 holiday contest prize ideas.
#1. An experience
The holidays are just as much about experiences as they are products or physical gifts. It’s a time to connect with friends and family to create life-long memories. Instead of a physical product, give away an experience that will help your customers create memories. Some examples of a holiday season experience could be a Thanksgiving cooking class or a Halloween Haunted House adventure like the one below.
#2. Meal giveaways
For families, the holidays can be expensive and stressful. Parents are juggling numerous back-to-back events, shopping days, and big cook-offs. You can help reduce this burden by giving away pre-cooked meals or a hamper of the ingredients they’ll need to cook for Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, or any holiday feast.
Timing is everything with this one. Close your contest and pick a winner at least a week or two before the holiday, so there’s time to deliver the meal and for the winner to plan around it.
#3. Party supplies
As well as gift-giving, shopping deals, and cooking feasts, the holiday season is synonymous with parties. Whether you’re hosting a Christmas party with your family or a New Year celebration with friends, you’ll need supplies. Food, drinks, and decorations help your customers host a party without the stress of organizing everything. The example below is giving away Thanksgiving table printables for free:
#4. Products
Product prizes are an obvious choice for a contest at any time of year, and the holidays are no different. Offering your products as a contest prize ensures that all entrants are interested in owning what it is you sell - making the leads highly qualified. You could bundle together some of your most popular products as a prize, launch a new product with a contest, or simply give away a best-seller, the choice is yours. This Halloween giveaway is putting up limited edition products as the prize:
#5. Themed prizes
There isn’t a better period of time than the holidays to offer themed contest prizes. It gets your potential customers in the spirit of the season and increases engagement with your campaign. Consider a New Year’s Eve party kit, a turkey feast for Thanksgiving, a menorah and gourmet gelt bundle for Hanukkah, or a North Pole experience for Christmas.
One word of caution: avoid alcohol as a prize unless you’ve checked the rules carefully. Alcohol giveaways are heavily regulated, many states restrict them, and social platforms have their own policies on alcohol promotions.
#6. Gift cards
They may sound a little boring but gift cards are the perfect prize for those that are indecisive. Perhaps your customers are unsure about which gift they should buy a family member, or they love your products but can’t decide on which one is right for them. A gift card giveaway removes uncertainty from the shopping experience and ensures they will make a purchase at a later date. The “Ugly Sweater Contest” for dogs is a creative approach to this style of a giveaway from a pet store:
#7. A year’s supply
As December rolls around, most people are reflecting on the year that’s been and planning for the new year to begin. While they think about the year ahead, it’s a great opportunity to offer a year-long prize to entice contest participants. Depending on your business, this prize could take different forms - brainstorm what your customers would use on a recurring basis throughout the year. The best year-long prizes are usually consumables, services, subscriptions, or memberships. You may also consider how you can align your prize with a New Year’s resolution, such as a year of gym classes or meal kits.
Be specific in your official rules about what a “year’s supply” means, such as one bag of coffee per month for 12 months, and state its approximate retail value.
#8. Cash
Much like the gift card prize, why not make things super simple and run a cash giveaway? Your customers will be eager to get their hands on extra cash to handle their increase in expenditure. This makes it an attractive contest prize.
The catch is that cash is attractive to everyone, not just your customers. Cash giveaways are great for reach and awareness, but they tend to attract prize hunters rather than qualified leads. If building your customer list is the goal, a gift card to your own store (see #6) will usually serve you better. And remember that winners may owe taxes on cash prizes, so put the prize value in your official rules.
#9. Vacations
The holidays are when family and friends get together, and that often means dreaming out loud about where to go next year. A vacation giveaway taps right into that conversation, which makes it an enticing offer for people who are already thinking about their next getaway.
Vacations are also one of the most complicated prizes to give away. Your rules will need to spell out exactly what’s included (flights, hotel, spending money), the approximate retail value, travel dates and blackout periods, and who’s responsible for taxes. High-value prizes can also trigger sweepstakes registration and bonding requirements in some states, such as New York and Florida, so check before you launch.
#10. Wishlist
Window shopping is a favorite past time for many consumers. It allows us to theoretically buy all of the things we love without the financial burden. The process of creating a “wishlist” is something many eCommerce stores have adopted as a way to draw people back to make a purchase at a later date when they can afford to do so. In much the same way, you can create a “wishlist” contest where participants have the chance to win their dream shopping list from your store.
#11. Services
The manic nature of the holiday season presents more than just a financial crunch on families, there is also a serious drain on time and sanity. Anything you can do for your customers to ease this strain is going to be well received. Offering holiday-related services, such as Christmas lights installation or a Thanksgiving feast cook up, could be enticing giveaway prizes.
#12. Donations
As I mentioned previously, the festive season is a time for giving and helping those in need. Instead of running a contest with a physical prize or experience, you could let the winning entrant choose a charity to receive a donation from your business. This will help a charity in need as well as create an emotional connection between customers and your company. This builds trust and loyalty.
Two things to keep in mind. First, if you advertise that you’ll donate a set amount for every entry or purchase, some states regulate that as a “commercial co-venture,” which can mean written agreements with the charity and even registration. Second, the donation comes from your business, so the tax deduction generally goes to you, not the winner. Word your promotion accordingly: “Winner chooses where we donate” is clearer than “We’ll donate on your behalf.”
#13. Multi-prize giveaways
Multi-prize giveaways create momentum and interest throughout the entire holiday season. These are often promoted as “Daily Prize” or “Weekly Prize” contests and have a chance to generate significant reach for your business. Of course, the prizes you give away will likely be of smaller perceived value to your customers, but because there are several opportunities to win, people will still enter. This strategy is an excellent way of staying top-of-mind with customers during the biggest spending period of the year.
Want to add even more excitement? Try instant-win prizes, where entrants find out on the spot whether they’ve won. That instant reward makes people more likely to come back and play again.
Conclusion
The right prize can make or break your holiday giveaway. As easy as it is to roll out the same old giveaway you’ve run dozens of times before, this approach will struggle to cut through the noise and catch the attention of your customers.
Instead, start with your goal, pick a prize that attracts the people you actually want to reach, and plan your timing so the prize arrives while it still matters. Then get into the spirit of the season with themed prizes, experiences, services, generous donations, and multi-prize events.
And here’s one last tip: Don’t let everyone who didn’t win walk away empty-handed. Send every entrant a discount code after they enter. It softens the blow of not winning, and it turns your contest entrants into holiday shoppers.
Create your first contest now
Get Started Today. It’s free and we don’t need your credit card.
