A little history:
The first time we did a holiday party, I hosted an ornament exchange. Lots of fun, but afterwards, I found out that a lot of older people don't put up Christmas trees, so the ornament exchange wasn't useful to them. Last year, we did a recipe exchange and made a little cookbook up for everyone.
This year, we had several people going through tough times. I needed an idea that would keep the budget low, and I wanted to focus on bringing people together, and encouraging people. I borrowed some of the ideas from the wonderful Ladies' Days hosted in the past by the church of Christ at Glen Springs Road.
This party is what I came up with.
I really wanted to draw people together, and so I tried to design the activities for the party to focus on interacting with others, getting to know people better, and sharing.
Before the party, I had each woman write out one or two of their favorite Bible verses or inspirational sayings. I typed them up and printed pages with enough copies of each verse/saying for every woman at the party. When the ladies arrived, I had them use decorative scissors to cut their sayings into strips. (Side note: this was difficult for for some people that had never used decorative scissors or had trouble with their eyes. Regular scissors were easier for them.)
After lunch, each lady decorated a jar (with a lid). I put out fabric, scrapbook papers, ribbons, and glue guns for the decorating.
Then, the ladies exchanged copies of their sayings. I wanted them to trade the sayings themselves, because I was trying to encourage interaction/sharing/togetherness.
After all of the crafty fun, we played two games. The first was a purse scavenger hunt. The ladies divided into teams of four, and they had 10 minutes to dig through their purses to find as many things on the list as possible. I was impressed at how much fun everyone seemed to have looking for things. I actually had my wonderful husband make the final list for the scavenger hunt, which you can find HERE. You can go HERE for the list that we used as inspiration.
Earlier, I said that I had each guest fill out a questionnaire about herself before coming to the party. I took those answers and made them into four line poems about each woman--without their name. For the next game, everyone received a printout of the poems and had to guess who the subject of each poem was. This ended up being really difficult for some, but funny as each woman tried to guess the answers--and tried to trick the other ladies in the room into revealing things about themselves to give away the answers. THIS is the questionnaire that I asked everyone to complete.
We had some great prizes donated for the party. Since they were bigger items, I used them as door prizes. We printed up tickets, and everyone received one ticket for coming. I gave more tickets to the game winners. Then, we did a drawing for the prizes at the end.
Everyone seemed to have a good time, and we plan to have another party soon. I hope you can use some of these ideas for your next gathering.
