Christmas Party, chez nous

I hope you all had lovely weekends! We're getting closer and closer to the Christmas break and I for one can't wait. I can't get enough of Christmas - I love how it stretches out over a month.

To celebrate, the Mr. and I hosted an "open house" style party yesterday - we wanted to do something where all of our friends could come without getting in the way of evening plans and/or kids' bed times. So, we hosted a get together yesterday afternoon. We had a bunch of people drop in before heading off to other events, so I think our timing plan worked well.

One thing I learned for next time - people drink WAY more red wine in the winter than in the summer, so stock up! In the summer I'm always surprisd by how much white gets drank, but yesterday red was king.

Here are some of the elements I captured from the party:

The greens in the vases are from my front door swag project, and the holly is from a plant in our yard.

I wanted to do feather wreaths here, but will have to be something I do next year! I couldn't find boa's where I was looking and ran out of time.

I updated my bar cabinet with some more festive decorations:

It took me almost three years to use these pewter frames (ha - knew I would use them some day! Never pass up a solid Pottery Barn sale item...):



This is what happens when you're dedicated to taking photos for a blog post while setting up for your party:

Yep, I dropped mylittle point and shoot ON the crackers. Well done, non? It was entertaining...so I did a little jenga-block-from-the-bottom move and voila:

And finally, a shot of the table. At this point guests were at the house so I could only squeeze in a few photos before donning my hostess hat.

*PS those "festive" plates weren't our first choice...we have some small plates but only about 12, so the Mr. ran to the store before our party started and these Christmas tree ones were his only choice! What's a Christmas party without a little cheesiness?