2nd Annual Christmas Party

Since we spend Thanksgiving with Mike's family, we spend Christmas with my family. Because we are away from Mike's family for Christmas, we started hosting a family Christmas party at our house. We started doing it last year, so this year was our second event. It was a blast. We had the party on Saturday, the 20th. It was snowing that day, so we weren't sure if we would end up having the party....but thankfully the weather cooperated (somewhat) and everyone made it to our house safe so we could party. We tried to keep things simple this year. We just made a potato bar for dinner. We had lots of toppings to go on the potatoes. Others brought salads and appetizers. We had a good spread of food. We ate, visited, and then played games and sang songs.

The first game we played was a new one and was lots of fun. Before the party, I had put $5 in a small box and wrapped it. I then placed that box in a bigger box and wrapped it and so on and so forth. There were several layers of wrapped boxes. The trick to the game was that we had to try to open the gift wearing oven mitts. Earlier in the day, we had a hard time even finding an oven mitt to use. We only have one and we needed two. Mike's mom didn't have any. His sister didn't have any. Mike couldn't find any at the store (or at least any cheap ones). Finally, Mike borrowed one from our neighbor (who said she has just cleaned out her kitchen drawers that day and wondered why she even had an oven mitt!) Gavin was our busy bee and so he picked the "magic number" for the game - 4. We passed a dice around and anytime somebody rolled a "4", they then had to put the oven mitts on and try to unwrap the present. It was an exciting couple of minutes. Paper was flying...babies were flying - or rolling off laps....:) kids were being passed around. Grandpa Henrie really displayed some creative, aggressive techniques to unwrap the boxes. It was hilarious. In the end, Suzanne claimed the $5. We were happy she won!

After our fun oven mitt game, we played our White Elephant game. Again, there were some great gifts....including the deviled egg platter that was left at our house last year from the White Elephant game (can you believe somebody didn't want that prize last year?!) Gavin, Alyssa, and Rylan even played this year. They thought it was fun. There were several prizes Alyssa wanted that nobody else did....including Dora bubbles and a pipe cleaner tiara.

We had a great night spending time with the family. We really enjoyed visiting with everyone and having fun together as a family. We did miss Jack - he thought it would be more fun to climb mountains in Mexico :). We also missed our family in Indiana. Thank you all for coming (thanks, Brad, for driving the girls down in your truck!) We can't wait for next year!