A CCVT Tradition Continues at The Homeplace

Our traditional semiannual outing to The Homeplace restaurant continues this Thursday! This delicious tradition started seven years ago and we've been going to The Homeplace restaurant at the end of each semester ever since. 

If you don't know about The Homeplace restaurant, you are missing out. Most people I know would say it's one of the best restaurants within an hour's drive of Blacksburg. It's out in the country in a small town called Catawba, about a half hour from here, near Roanoke. They make the most delicious southern style food like country ham, fried chicken, and roast beef, with mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, coleslaw, pinto beans, and other fruits or vegetables of the day, and apple butter for your buttermilk biscuits, and really good sweet tea and lemonade, and fruit cobbler for dessert. And because we are going on a Thursday we will also have the option of pulled pork BBQ with our meal! 

As if the food wasn't good enough, we also get to eat it "family style" where you all sit around a huge table and just pass the food around and put however much you want on your plate and pass it on to the next person. It's like a big family holiday dinner. And the servers just keep bringing the food out until everybody has had as much as they want to eat. 

All of this only costs about 15 dollars -- all you can eat, remember -- and it even includes your drink, dessert, and tax! The only thing you need to add is the tip. 

So take a much needed study break before resuming your cramming for exams and come on out to join us. As Joe wanted me to be sure to point out, you're going to have to take time to eat anyway, so why not come and eat with us? 

And bring some friends with you, too. 

Just meet us at the campus house at 4:30pm and we'll carpool from there. We'll probably get back to campus around 8:30 or 9pm. 

Remember: 4:30pm Thursday, at the campus house. 15 dollars plus tip. 

See you then. 

Christmas Party this Friday

CCVT's awesome annual Christmas party is 6:30pm this Friday at the campus house.

Yum!
We'll enjoy some delicious hot chocolate, hot spiced cider, Christmas cookies, and various other "Christmas desserts" while the sounds of some of your favorite Christmas music fill the air. You'll even get to decorate your own Christmas cookies! We'll provide the cookies and supplies. You provide your decorative skills. 

If you'd like to bring a Christmas dessert to share, that would be awesome and very much appreciated and enjoyed by all, I'm sure. But you don't have to bring anything to gain admission to the party.

White Elephant gift exchange
The tradition continues. What's a White Elephant gift exchange? Well, I have no idea where the name comes from, but it's a really fun, yet inexpensive, way to celebrate Christmas by exchanging gifts.

Here are your instructions: Bring a gift worth about 10 dollars. (For those of you who have done this with us before, we are increasing the suggested value of the gifts this year to raise the bar on the quality so that everybody ends up getting something they will really enjoy. This should also stir up more "gift circulation" in the game.) It doesn't have to be brand new, and you don't actually have to spend $10 on it if you happen to find a great deal or whatever -- It just needs to be worth about that much. 

Students in past years have found some great gifts combing the isles of thrift shops like Good Will, or the YMCA thrift shop on North Main Street. Sometimes the shopping part of this game turns out to be almost as much fun as the game itself.

Some popular ideas from years past are: really nice Christmas decorations, a toy, some nifty gadget, or yummy food, or something like that. Use your imagination. What would you enjoy getting?

Now that you have your gift, there is one more very important thing you need to do with it. You need to wrap it, and you need to wrap it well enough that nobody can tell what it is. This is part of what makes the game fun. We're all going to put our gifts in a big pile and take turns picking a present out of the pile. There is more to it than that, but this mystery is part of what makes the game fun, like when you were a kid and couldn't wait to open your presents under the Christmas tree and kept shaking them and tapping them trying to figure out what they might be. So wrap it well enough that it's not obvious what it is.

If you don't have wrapping paper, use newspaper or paper grocery bags or something. It doesn't have to be pretty, just a mystery. Besides, I've seen gifts wrapped in these that ended up looking surprisingly good.

We'll explain the rest of the rules at the party. Suffice it to say, we always have a lot of laughs with this game.

Games & Movies

We also have some Christmas themed party games planned, and we'll have some Christmas movies available to watch. 

Invite Your Friends
Invite your friends to join us. Just remember to explain to them about bringing a gift for the gift exchange, or else provide one for them yourself, so they don't get left out of that. It's gonna be a lot of fun.

Remember:
6:30pm this Friday at the campus house
Bring a wrapped gift worth about $10
Bring a Christmas dessert to share if you are feeling extra generous in the spirit Christmas

Thanks, and I hope to see you at Oasis this Wednesday.
Steve

Upcoming Events

Welcome back to campus! Hope you all had an awesome Thanksgiving Break and are well rested and ready to finish the semester strong.

We just wanna let you know about two special events we have coming up here with CCVT:

This Friday, Dec. 5, at 6:30pm we will be having our Christmas Party! I'll email you with more details later, probably tomorrow, but right now I can tell you plans include delicious Christmas desserts, decorating Christmas cookies, playing some Christmas party games, a "white elephant" gift exchange, and a "Christmas movie." It's gonna be a lot of fun!

Reading Day, Thursday, Dec. 11 we will be continuing one of our oldest CCVT traditions when we carpool out to The Homeplace restaurant in Catawba, VA, about a 40 minute drive away, to enjoy a mindbogglingly delicious feast together. I'll email you more details about this, too, as we get closer to that date, but I'll just let you know, if you've never been there before, this place is so fun to go to with a big group of your friends because they serve the food family style -- in big bowls set on the table, and then you just pass them around and put what you want on your plate, like you do at home when you are eating with your family, and they just keep bringing the food out until you've all had as much as you want. And did I mention it tastes soooooo good?

So be sure to mark these dates on your calendar and join us. And feel free to invite your friends to come, too.

Hope to see you at Oasis this Wednesday at 7:15pm at the CCVT campus house.

God bless.
Steve