Christmas In October-10/25/11

I've blogged since 2008 but in the last few months, I've finally started following other blogs.  I've discovered something about myself.  I am hopelessly into themes.  Maybe it's the teacher in me but everything is more fun in themes...themed parties, themed food, themed lessons.  I know there is a large and vocal group of people that find themes cheesy but I  (and may I add, Martha Stewart) am not one of them.   I love things all tied together around one central idea. That's why I've had so much fun with Eyrleigh's parties and what I've become really addicted to looking at on blogs that show parties all centered around everything from apples to zebras.

My last blog post was a seriously tardy review of our Halloween party and this post will continue that.  Here is a quick summary of our Christmas party LAST year complete with allergy friendly food ideas, a game, a craft, and some fun Christmas stories.
The photo above is our table setup.  Now that I've spent hours looking at all these classy party purveyors, I see we are pretty amateur but this is for  two-year-old preschool class and not wealthy paying clients.  I actually left my camera in the car for this party so I had to get my pictures from Lori. 

Here are some of the cool things we did to make the food more fun.  The fruit for the party was threaded on kabobs and stuck in a whole pineapple.  If you look closely you can see the star fruit at the ends to give a Christmas look to our fruit tree.  We also made little ham sandwiches.  Jacob, Lori's son, has outgrown his wheat allergy and can have certain breads if they are made without milk products.  We cut these little sandwiches in tree shapes with a cookie cutter.  Like at the Halloween party, we made Jello Christmas bells in red and green and even cut out candy cane shapes from corn tortillas and fried them for chips.  

Lori took some good closeups of our most creative additions to the food.  We made little popcorn snowmen for the kids to take home.  Basically, we made these much like Rice Krispie treats.  We melted marshmallows,  mixed it with popcorn, and rolled the popcorn into two balls.  We used raisins for eyes, fruit leather cut into strips for a scarf, pretzel rods for arms, and Skittles for buttons.  They were really cute and fun to eat.  Lori also made some adorable Christmas mice.  She used Enjoy Life chocolate cookies and dipped one half in melted baking chocolate (also from Enjoy Life Foods).  The ears are sunflower seeds and the tails are red licorice rope.  She even made a snowy bed of coconut.  So cute!

Our craft went perfectly.  The little Christmas mouse you see Jacob holding was was easy for the kids to assemble.  The mom who made them cut out a red mouse shape from felt (basically a teardrop shape) and put two slits near the pointed end.  She then cut out green ears (basically a dumbbell shape) that could be slipped through the slits in the red.  The children were given two eyes and a small white pompom for a nose to glue on themselves.  The candy cane attached by sliding into the loop created by the ears on the underside.  The kids thought these were great and they didn't take a lot of parental assistance.

Our game was actually a repeat of one we played with the kids at Halloween...and I completely forgot to explain in that post.  We choose a fast beat Christmas song, I think "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree".  (At Halloween, we did the Monster Mash and Ghostbusters.)   We placed two different Christmas themed shapes on the floor with enough of each one for each child.  (Here you see we did gingerbread men and trains, at Halloween I did pumpkins and ghosts)  We played the song and got the kids dancing then quickly stopped the music and shouted one of the two shapes.  The kids had to run and stomp on the shape we called....kind of like musical chairs with no losers.  The kids got to dance around and work on shape recognition and following directions.  It was fun!

We read a few holiday stories too.  The Night Before Christmas is always a great one and I have a beautiful pop-up one by by Clement C. Moore and Niroot Puttapipat.   Snowmen at Christmas by Caralyn and Mark  Buehner has cute rhyming and is easy for little kids to follow. 

This final picture is just for laughs.  Eyrleigh and Jacob are usually at school while Lori and I make the party food but because of timing, they played while we worked the day before the party.  This adorable picture is the two of them playing in the Jello scraps after we cut out the bells.  They ate some, they smashed some, and basically had a blast.  Gotta love them!