Past Progressive

I don't know about you, but the biggest motivation ever for cleaning my house is to invite people over. Better yet, a LOT of people over!!! So, when our Young Families class started planning a progressive dinner, I volunteered our house immediately!


So, just in case you don't know what a progressive dinner is, let me explain: You start off at one house for appetizers, another house for salads, another house for the main course, and yet another house for desserts (or however you want to split up your meal).


I volunteered for desserts for 2 reasons:


1. I did NOT want to have to worry about having enough sit-down, formal seating for 30+ people. I figured desserts were more informal.


2. I didn't want to have to cook main course-ish type of foods. I do okay at cakes and sweets. Cooking turkey or whatever for that many people would break me out in hives!

So, with all those people coming over so early in December, the pressure was ON to get the Christmas decorations up and ready... I did make a conscious decision to scale down the decorations in order to be ready in time. I normally do the big tree in the great room, our 7-ft tree in our bedroom with all the Hallmark ornaments, then a 4-ft tree in the kids' playroom that has all their ornaments and homemade ornaments. The 7-ft tree never even made it out of storage... the 4 ft tree is... well, it's still sitting in the playroom undecorated. We just haven't gotten to it yet, that's all.

Anyway.

So, Don and I got the big tree up and decorated in the days prior to the party. The 2 gifts under the tree are gifts the kids wrapped from their Santa's Cottage at school. The fact that I haven't bought, much less wrapped, hardly anything is another post for another time. Or not.

And we got the fireplace decorated... somewhat. We didn't hang our wreath way up the stone wall. yet. It could still happen!!! And I'm not sure why I was holding the camera at such a tilted angle here. Oh well. You can still get the picture, so to speak!!!

So, once the evening got started, we were appetized, then full of salad, then turkey and veggie, then OUR house!!! I took pictures of the previous events and posted them here, but... what do you know? Once everyone got to OUR house, I was too busy to take lovely pictures of all the desserts! So, my camera didn't make it back out again until gift time. And might I add that these were all white elephant/dirty santa/gag gifts (whatever it is you might call them... they weren't serious gifts).

Here are a few shots...

Here's Kristin opening a sweatshirt from me. I bought it for the Redneck party from the goodwill, but found something even MORE redneck to wear... speaking of, Kristin accidentally left the sweatshirt at my house afterwards. I'll have to remember to drop it by her house! I'm sure she's already missing it! :)

Even with the stress of having to have a CLEAN HOUSE, it was a great night!!! Fun, silly, and delicious!!! You can't ask for more than that for a fun night, can you??