A christmas party or four

Well, this post won't have any pictures which is lame. I'm so bad at remembering to bring our camera to stuff so now I'm kicking myself that I can't document it. The end of the semester was a flurry of Christmas parties, as usual. First, we had our staff Christmas party. Our staff team had a potluck dinner and white elephant gift exchange. The best gifts this time were a geek clock, which had equations for each number (like square root for 9 for 3:00). We ended up with that one. Lindsey's gift was also great. She photoshopped Miles' (our campus director) face into a Jonas Brothers picture. One of his daughters ended up picking that one, which made it even more awesome. So that was Christmas party #1.

Next we had the servant team over for lunch. The servant team is a group of students that lead specialized areas such as Evangelism, Community, Conferences, etc. It got a little tight with about 18 people over at our place, but we had a fun time playing games, eating great potato soup Josh made (thanks to a great recipe from his dad!) and gorging ourselves on chocolate chip cookies (thanks to another great recipe from Josh's mom!).

Party #3 was our Bible study party. Since Josh and I both lead senior bible studies, we decided to join forces and do a combined party. There were about 20 students there, which made it really fun. We played games and had some good desserts. Including the Nutella brownies that one of my girls made which I am now obsessed with. Wow, I really want to go make some now but have neither brownie mix nor Nutella. And also it's 10:30 at night. I digress. Party #3 was fun and we really love those students we get to work with. And one more side note, they were SO sweet to us and gave us a gift card to Cheesecake Factory as a Christmas present. We can't wait to go and were just so blown away by how kind and generous they were to us.

Our last party of the Christmas season was with our small group at church. I don't think I've blogged about them yet, but we are so blessed by that group of people. It's a group of 5 couples and we've really enjoyed getting plugged in with our church that way. We had some good time to hang out with each other, enjoyed more great food and had another white elephant gift exchange. There were lots of movies that got exchanged and we ended up with "Changing Lanes." Anyone seen it? Guessing if it got traded it might not be that great, but we'll see!

So imagine seeing pictures of really good food, me laughing playing the Fishbowl game (its like charades and catch phrase) and weird gifts. It was a great way to end our semester and kick off the Christmas season!