Last weekend we had a Christmas party for my husband’s fire department unit. It turned out so fun, and everyone had a great time! Here are the details!

We started out with having some festive treats and drinks. First up, boozy Christmas cherry bombs! These were so easy to make, and they tasted amazing. You can soak them in whatever alcohol you prefer, I chose to follow the recipe and used vanilla vodka. They were amazingly easy!

Next was another snack called Santa crunch popcorn. The only part that took a little bit of time was sorting out the green and red M&M’s since our local Kroger was out of the pre-sorted ones. Hadley had fun sorting them for me, while watching The Office on her iPad. After the candy-coated popcorn dried, I sorted them into separate bags.

The Santa coke cupcakes were the most time consuming, but the most festive out of all the snacks! Each one is a mini-Coke can, you tie a black ribbon around the can, and use the tops from each can as Santas belt buckle. The Santa faces came with the website where I found the recipe at, you just cut each one out and tape or glue it to the can. And the one thing I’m not good at, is piping icing but I think it turned out okay.

Red velvet cake pops. I don’t follow a recipe for these anymore, they are too easy. You can use whatever cake mix flavor you like, whatever frosting flavor you like, whatever sprinkles you like. Super easy.

The mini-Christmas cookies are from a local baker that bakes out of her home. I won’t share where these are from because they were not that great tasting, but they looked amazing! I always have a hard time finding cookies that look fabulous, and taste great too!

All the treats were on our side shelf in the office.

We had two tables set up in addition to our dining table. It never fails, anytime we have people over everyone always congregates in the kitchen. After I win the lottery, my future dream home kitchen will be ginormous! Kevin ordered a bouquet of flowers just for the party, they added a little festive touch to bar cart. What is not pictured on the bar cart, were all appetizers! I can’t believe I didn’t take a photo! We had a Christmas tree shaped charcuterie board, Christmas tree dip with vanilla wafers, graham crackers, and pretzels, cashews, and pizza croissants.

My daughter is not a huge fan of dresses, or girly stuff to some degree, so it’s almost impossible to get her to dress up for things. Unless she has to, like for her First Communion next year haha. I had ordered these Bro and Sis shirts for Christmas but thought she would wear that over anything else so that’s what happened. They looked cute together.

We catered Chipotle for this party, and this is the look on my face when I went to pick up our order. Long story short, but when I went to pick up the order, they handed me everything and said it’s all there. So, my trusting self left Chipotle, and did not even look at the order. I get home, which is only about a 5-minute drive anyway, and they only gave us one of the two orders! Oh my goodness I wasn’t happy. I drove back to Chipotle, spoke with the catering guy and turns out he only printed page one out of the two pages of my order on his printer. I had to wait another 20 minutes for them to make the second order, when I had placed this order online a week in advance! Nothing I can do, but it was frustrating at the time.

My favorite thing I made for this party were the Christmas cookie shots! I failed to take a good photo of them, but in the second photo below you can see the tray filled with shot cups with a rim of frosting / sprinkles on top. These are called a Christmas cookie shot from Buffalo Trace. The recipe didn’t call for a rim of frosting, but I added it for a festive touch. All I did was put the shot cups in vanilla frosting, and then dipped them in a bowl of sprinkles. Every single one of these were gone by the end of the night, they were that good. We made Hadley two of them filled with her favorite raspberry lemonade, she loved it!

Hadley played a few rounds of Uno and was having a ball. She can hold her own, and it was super cute to watch her play with all adults. We were supposed to have a few kids around Hadleys age come to the party, but that couldn’t happen at the last minute. Hadley still had fun amongst all adults. It was nice to meet Kevin’s unit outside of the firehouse, and to get to know some of the wives. I’m so glad they all came!

Links to recipes:
Boozy Christmas Cherry Bombs
Santa Crunch Popcorn
Santa Coke Cupcakes
Christmas Cookie Shots