Christmas Party 2011

I had been wanting to have a party or get together for some time. Halloween was my first choice, but didn't work out, so we went ahead and had a party for Christmas. My first thought was to do a cookie exchange of some sort, but it kind of spiraled from there. My good friend Amanda graciously offered to help me out. She is a complete party planning genius and is amazing. She was in charge of the decorations on the tables. I was kind of bummed that we were limited as to how many people we could invite because of the size of our house. Next year I think I will copy another friend's party which was the day after ours. She just made her party an open house which was brilliant because anyone can stop by at any time, leaving room for as many people as you can afford to feed :)

We had so much food it was ridiculous. We had little smokies from Costco, chicken roll ups, dipped cinnamon topped oreos, oreo bon bons or truffles, wreath cookies, pretzel peanut bark, rolo pretzel pecans, assorted Christmas candy, chips and rotel dip(made by our friend Jerry), bread and spinach dip, crackers and pretzels and another dip. Amanda made a buffalo chicken dip, cake pops, Christmas chex mix with the cutest little santa hats, yummy peppermint chip cookies, delicious red velvet cupcakes, and the toppings for the hot chocolate bar. I hope I didn't forget anything. Plus all our guests brought yummy food to share as well. I will try to come back later and write down recipes or links for some of the food shown.

We played stuff Santa which involved 2 lucky guests dressing up in my maternity and fat clothes and stuffing them with balloons. We played girls against guys and raced to see who could stuff their person with all their balloons the fastest. The second game we played was building a snowman. One person from each team was the snowman while teammates wrapped them with toilet paper, dressed them with gloves, boots, scarves, and hats, and put big black paper buttons on the front. The first team to finish building their snowman wins. I had prizes for everyone who participated for being such good sports. We also played name that toon. Our friends Jerry and Amanda had recorded several different Christmas songs and we had to match them with the artist that sang them. We played a present game where I had wrapped a gift several times in different boxes and each person got to take a turn trying to unwrap the present with oven mitts when they rolled a certain number. The kids also got to play pin the nose on Rudolph. It was a lot of fun and I wish I had taken a few more pictures.