Girls' Night Christmas Party!

Most of my friends here in St. Louis I've met through my church group, and practically all of them followed their husbands out here for law school, medical school, or PhD programs. Basically, everyone at church is a student or is married to one, and that means that the weeks leading up to Christmas are stressful times of studying for finals and writing papers. With that being said, I knew that planning a Christmas party with couples would be tricky with school schedules and people taking off for the holidays, so a night with the girls it was!

We started off with a hot chocolate + toppings bar and cookies. It was great because everyone could customize their hot chocolate to their liking, there were enough choices that everyone's drinks could be as exciting or boring as they wanted, and just the fact that it was hot chocolate was great. (I found a homemade hot chocolate recipe on Pinterest that definitely blew my expectations out of the water, and I'd link to it if I could find it. Oops! It was made by melting the marshmallows into it all.) The holidays are all about sweets and warm drinks, right? :)
Hot chocolate: homemade & peppermint hot chocolate.
Toppings/Mix-Ins: candy canes, marshmallows, whipped cream, cinnamon, peppermint Kisses, M&M's, truffles, Pirouette rolled wafers, coconut, and Andes mints.
Cookies: my mother-in-law's candy cane shortbread cookies, cake mix peppermint Kisses cookies, brownie brittle, and mint chocolate cookies. After we had a chance to get some treats and chat a bit, we played a few games. The first game we played was the "Oven Mitt" game. It has a million different names, so you might know it as something else. Before the party, I wrapped two little gifts I picked up from the store at least 30 times. (It helps if you turn on a Netflix show or something to distract you from the monotonous task!) With everyone sitting in the circle, you take turns rolling two dice trying to get doubles as someone puts on oven mitts and uses a plastic fork and knife to try to open the present. As soon as someone rolls doubles, the person unwrapping the present has to stop and quickly pass everything to the other person. The game is over when someone gets through the last layer and can see what the present is.

We also did a small gift exchange. In the invite, I specified that we wanted to keep things around $3, but the gift had to be something red or green...not necessarily something Christmasy! My friend, Lauren, who threw the party with me found a fun story on Pinterest that dictated which direction the gifts were passed. For example, every time she said the word "left," we passed to the left. It was a lot more fun than the traditional steal a present three times kind of gift exchange, and I was impressed with the diversity of the gifts! People ended up getting lipgloss, fingernail polish, a candle, a pomegranate & red candy, winter socks, etc.

The best thing planned for the night was the photo booth! Most of the time when we get together for girls' nights, we forget to snap a picture or two of the group, so it was fun to have people rotating in front of the camera and dressing up. (I went to Dollar Tree a few days before the party and bought a few reindeer antlers/Santa hats/elf hats/etc. and got everything for less than $5.) To make the background, I taped sheets of wrapping paper to the wall and hung some lights with Command hooks. Easy, cheap, and not hard to clean up!

Have you thrown a Christmas party this year? What kinds of games did you play, if any? Did you do a gift exchange, have treats, or require people to wear ugly sweaters?