A Fun Holiday Party

Don’t you just love the holidays?

The other night, we had my best friend from high school, Mallory, and her husband and two little girls over, along with Matt and Beau and, in a fun little surprise, my sister and her wife showed up, too.

Suddenly, our house was filled with so many people we love. The kids ran around upstairs while we listened to Smooth Jazz Christmas music downstairs and caught up on the last few weeks.

How cute do the girls look?!

Whenever we were planning this very last minute get together, each person took turns texting me separately asking what they could bring to the party. I know that seems like a small thing, but it’s such a thoughtful gesture that really means a lot, especially when we’re all so busy and have so much going on in our own lives.

Mallory brought some seriously addicting chocolate Chex mix she made, along with a Cheese-Its ranch concoction and a bottle of wine, and her husband made these little homemade apple pies with the kids halfway through the night. We Instacarted some ice-cream because you can’t have warm apple pie without cold ice cream. That’s a rule that must not be broken.

Matt and Beau brought some wine and made their famous Caesar salad that I request way too often (wait until you try it- it’s my favorite salad ever), and we all just sort of pitched in in different ways throughout the night.

The kids ate pizza in their room (something that NEVER happens but we allowed it that night because #ChristmasBreak) and watched Netflix while we popped in on them from time to time.

After dinner, we all settled in the living room for a game of Celebrity. Here’s how you play:

We each wrote five names of people we all would know on little pieces of paper. Most of them were famous, but a few weren’t: One was Mallory’s daughter and one was Dixie, our best friend who lives and works on our farm.

We put all the papers in a bowl and split into two teams. Then, we went around in a circle and whoever was “it” would get in front of their group and try to get their team to guess it.

In round one, you can say whatever words you want to describe the person, just no proper nouns. This is definitely the easiest round and really sets the ton for the entire game.

In round two, which occurs when you go through every name in round one, you can only use one word to describe the name you drew, which gets very interesting and is so much harder than we all thought, because you have to choose your word so carefully (you only get one!).

In round three, there are no words, only actions to describe the person whose name you drew. This was SO nerve-wracking and frustrating and so damn much fun. We were all screaming by the end of it and I haven’t laughed that hard in so long.

The great thing about this game is, if you’re playing with people you know as well as we did, you can use that to your advantage and use inside jokes and clues you have built up over the years to describe the celebrities to one another. It was a great exercise in not only how well you knew the celebrities, but how well you knew each other.

After that, we all played The Chameleon, which was even more exhilarating. Highly recommend getting this game for your next family game night!

We stayed up way too late and I was exhausted the next day, but it was so worth it. I love cozy nights in like this during this time of the year. I don’t want the holidays to end! I’m going to see if I can get everyone to agree to repeat this night for New Year’s next week so we can do it all over again. We shall see!

PS: if you want to see this night in video form, you can click here to watch the vlog!!