2011 Relief Society Christmas Dinner/Program

i LOVE serving on the relief society committee! i love planning gatherings! wendy came up with the theme this year and we just rolled with it.

as you entered the room, we had the programs sitting out and also brown paper bags for the ladies that forgot to wrap their ornaments that we asked them to bring for an exchange.

wendys mom had made a beautiful wise men still seek him sign that looked great on the piano with christmas lights.

remember how i mentioned we were at the church the night before until 1am? it was because wendy's husband mark hung lights for us. our cultural hall has that itchy carpeting wall all the way to the ceiling. so he had to use screws (shh) in the wall, then strung hanging wire overhead, then he twisted the lights around them to make sure they didn't droop on us. then wendy added some paper lanterns she bought last year for another party.  

our centerpieces may look familiar ;) years ago when i threw my parents an anniversary party, i did the same thing. i took the glass and backing out of a frame and printed a picture on vellum. then glued 3 frames together and added a votive tealight in the middle to illuminate it.

for dinner we served pita and (homemade) hummus as an appetizer. then had cream cheese chicken over rice, greek salad (mmm... feta), and orange slices.

(stolen picture) for dessert we had brownies that looked pretty similar to these. except we couldn't get the candy canes in! we had baked the brownies in round cake pans, so we could get nice and neat triangles when we sliced them. but what i think happened is the edges started to get crispy before the middle was finished :/ so we just tossed that idea and just set the candy cane on the plate.

our program was short and sweet. just how we like it ;) we had our bishop read, "the crippled lamb". it is now one of my fav christmas books! definitly check it out!

then we had a sister read, "santa's birthday gift." also a great story. the author wrote it after reading the nativity story to her grandchild and at the end he/she said, "but where's santa?" so this is a cute rhyming story that combines the 2.

i found this picture online and framed it to have on display.

we had each sister bring an ornament for an exchange. we sat in a circle and a sister read, "twas the night after christmas." and when she said the word AND, your ornament got passed to the left. and when she said the word THE, your ornament got passed to the right. so that was fun to see all of us get confused.

and lastly our handout...

*phew* you have no idea the kind of sort of headache these caused! when it came time to buy the clear ornaments, i could NOT find them anywhere without pay a TON! but finally i found a  website and thanks to the quantity i ordered, i got boxes of 6 ornaments for $1.19/each! then came the vinyl, originally she quoted me for 75 cents/piece. i needed 100! i sent her a message back letting her know that was out of price range. she then asked how much we could pay. i told her $15. AND SHE ACCEPTED IT! LOL!  the lady i ordered from on etsy (i believe i was her first ever customer), took FOREVER to get them to me!  some were brown, some where black. she didn't have transfer paper on them. it was just, ugh, a mess! and i should've had them in time to assemble them at our next committee meeting. of course i didn't! so thankfully wendy and willow came over late one night and we whipped them up and just chit chatted. we stuck the vinyl on a piece of transparency paper (which thankfully a sister used her silhouette to cut), then rolled the transparency tight enough to fit it through the top of the ornament. when we let it go, it unrolled and we just had to straighten it up a bit. then we glued a glittered bow to the top and i found a cute scroll ornament hooks at the dollar tree that we used. it's hard to tell in this picture, but the nativity looks like it's floating inside the ornament.