Whew! Thank Goodness that's over. No no! I mean, thank goodness the Christmas party I've been planning for months if not an entire year went off amazingly well and
almost incident free (I'll give you a hint: It involves an ice pack, I have the mark to prove it, and a very large F bomb was dropped) and now... I can finally share the process with the interwebs.
Hoorah! Mazel Tov!
If anything I've learned this year or thought about a lot was that of time and time management. More particularly is to think ahead to free time and how precious it will be when it comes and just plan ahead. For example, when I knew I'd be working on our anniversary, Matt and I celebrated our anniversary early. Why put off doing stuff you know you're going to do so just handle things early. This year I didn't want the costs and planning to sneak up on me so I spread them out over a few months. I bought the booze two months before the party and refrigerated the beverages that needed refrigerating:
At World Market I found these wines. Holy crap. Black and white lettering in both red and white wines and they came from France and the label was in FRENCH SCRIPT! I bought three of each. Luckily they were tasty as well as cute.
Since the meal was a traditional multi-course meal I wanted matching utensils for each course so I bought a full set for 12. Word to the wise: always buy for 12. You can always just add a few sets later. I actually bought them at World Market for $10 for a set of 12 of either spoons, knives or forks. Gosh that store saves me. Anyway, a few weeks before the party, I washed them all...
...and put them in their own special cutlery tray that luckily I kept even though I'd upgraded to a larger set for our larger drawers when we moved.
Now I'll always be ready with matching flatware.
And to protect the supplies from cats and babies, I put them in a large impossible to open by hands without full strength and opposable thumbs box and stored them in the pantry.
A week before the party I bagged already made ice and let the fridge make more ice.
To be party ready, I set the bar area closer to eye level where guests could booze freely.
I bought a few more flutes to round out the 12 and then washed, dried, and carefully stored all stemware.
I also washed, dried...
...and ironed all the linens before the party. Well not the tablecloth. That would be too much work.
The most important thing about the party to little mrs decorator was the look of the table. The menu, the music, that was all decided, I just wanted to figure out the table. Because like I told Ambre, my friends have stopped thinking of me as the EvY who is clueless about cooking and I don't feel the pressure about proving myself anymore, I've improved my reputation in that department. For me, it was about the wow factor. About them walking in and sitting at a beautiful table and being impressed. My original inspiration was this table setting by Coco-Kelly.
I wanted stripes. I bought three yards of striped fabric at Ikea, expanded the table up as wide as it went and just basically
played with the look. The theme was a French Christmas from the
invites down to the party favors, which predictably were eiffel towers. Oh the shame.
When I started planning the party I said to myself no stinking eiffel towers. But they were the only eiffel towers at the party and they were pretty cute so I ripped the Target labels off and affixed my own with everyone's name to indicate seating arrangement.
So now came my playtime. I set the table to see what it would look like about a month before the party. I was satisfied. Yup, gonna be great once we add the stemware.
And then I found these guys and the table went in another direction...
...it went red.
No comments:
Post a Comment