Holiday Cheer With a Dirty Snowman

This past weekend Kara (a.k.a. Elfie) and Ryan hosted a holiday party for our group of friends and it was nothing short of delightful from start to finish. I appreciate my hometown girlfriends and when I think about Maggie making friends and maintaing friendships of her own, I hope she gets a taste of what it truly means to have friends that span all the seasons of life.

Some friends are ‘old’ friends in this group and some are ‘new.’  Kara, for example, I met when I was only months old and she was just new to the world. We don’t even remember meeting. Krista, on the on the other hand, I didn’t meet until 7th grade and she’s  a ‘new’ friend. Everyone else falls in between that and their own ‘meeting’ stories are interwoven and have the overwhelming ‘we’re supposed to be friends’ tone.

We’ve since brought dudes into the mix and they mix and mingle just fine when we all gather. As the night wound down, the girls were in one room and the guys in another. They guys talked tools, the world problems and their jobs. The girls? We talked childbirth. No wonder the men stayed in the kitchen.

Kara and Ryan’s  house was beautifully decorated and full of yummy food and tasty drinks. In fact, Kara even invented a drink called The Dirty Snowman. It was rather intense, but people kept going back for more, so it had to have been good! Kara and I got it in our heads that we wanted to create a make-shift photo booth and snap photos of everybody.

It felt like we were 10 again with some hair-brained idea that we were uber excited about. Like the time that we thought we were going mountain climbing and attached a rope to the a tree on a very, very dangerous rock wall. When an adult finally got wind of what we were doing/had done, we were told not to play in that area again. Or the time that we went to Hawaii in 6th grade and decided to bring our roller blades….that was before they charged you for luggage. Or the time that we decided to go hiking and camping, but ended up spending the night at my grandparent’s house (we were almost in college for that one).

Anyhow, everybody else went along with the idea and even subjected themselves to very hot Christmas lights, which I’m kind of surprised didn’t either catch on fire of burn somebody…now that I think about it. As our excitement grew and we contemplated all the areas in their house to use that would accommodate my lens capabilities – the bathroom shower curtain would have been AWESOME – and have good lighting, we landed on a corner in the living room. Ryan offered, and I accepted, to bring in industrial lighting….and come to think of it, those lights got really, really hot too. It’s a wonder that we all didn’t get burned in some way.

Once we got rolling, it was really fun, or at least I think the girls thought it was fun. Some of the guys had tortured looks on their faces, but since the girls had all reverted back to giggling, loud chatter-boxes, there wasn’t much room to argue. I’m quite pleased with what we got.

By the time we wrapped up the lights and took the last picture, it was time to move onto the gift exchange. Barry and I made out like bandits because we scored a cute dish towel/ hot pad and coasters that Marc and Lara made…SCORE!!  Erin won the award for being the nicest of us all because she “stole” Kara’s gift of toilet paper. Erin also won the award for luckiest because wrapped in the toilet paper were scratch tickets.  I am totally stealing that idea someday.

Great, great night with very sparkly people.

Thanks again Kara & Ryan!