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