Merry Christmas in July!

We all know how Christmas obsessed I am, so it is no surprise that when I saw that Christmas in July was on a Saturday that I needed to have a party. I came to the conclusion a bit late though and being out of town three times in the last few weeks meant that it was a hastily thrown together party. Christmas in July is often overlooked and I have such fabulous memories of celebrating as a kid at Lakeside when they had a live nativity the one summer and then later when I worked there going to Put-In-Bay for the evening. I wanted to have more Christmas in July memories, so party was scheduled and guests were invited!

Of course when it came to food and drink, my first thought was that we have to have Jingle Juice. I love Jingle Juice. In addition, some of the other festive food included a veggie tree and peppermint s'mores. Had more people come, I would have made more, including mistletoe jello shots and cut out cookies. There was also pepperoni rolls, buffalo chicken dip and Rita's. Oh and shredded chicken sandwiches that I kind of bombed! Christmas in July is tricky because you want to have themed food but if you think about it do you really want to be in a hot kitchen with crock pots and the oven going or spending hours making sugar cookies? Yeah, I didn't want to be doing that because I wanted to spend as much time that afternoon as possible at the swimming pool.

Decorating was much easier than I had expected considering that some of my Christmas decorations were readily available in the office turned storage space. I grabbed a small tree for the deck and the Charlie Brown tree for the kitchen. Of course there is always the famous Elf poster and than a canvas painting that my sister made for more decor . We already have Christmas lights on the deck, so that worked perfect and I had some holiday plates and napkins from a gift to use. I didn't want too much, so I think it worked out well.

I put on the invitation that there would be a White Elephant exchange but I didn't do that great of job reminding people, so it was a small one. We also had a snowball fight (water balloons) at midnight, which was awesome since it was still like 80 degrees and consisted more of us throwing balloons at the garage. I had also planned on showing Elf in the backyard but people were in and out and seemed content just hanging out and talking.

All in all it was a nice relaxing evening! Merry Christmas!