For the last few years for December visiting teaching my companion and I have hosted a little Christmas dinner.  It is always fun to have a Christmas girls night.  I make ornaments every year so I make a few extra for everyone.  I have a bit of an obsession with trees and I have a bit of a tree theme for my Christmas decorations this year, so I decided to use the same theme for the dinner.  I set up one of my trees for the centerpiece with the ornaments hanging from it.  I wanted some little gift boxes filled with Christmas chocolates, and I had some silver ones that I used for our wedding favors, but I couldn’t find any in the stores I looked in and didn’t have time to order any.  I found a template online and used some thick silver paper from extra wedding invitations I have and tied bows around them to look like little gifts around the tree.  They wern’t as nice as the boxes I used four our wedding but they worked.

It was really windy last week so there were a bunch of small tree branches along the road when I went walking that morning, so I picked up some of them along the way.  I cut some small pieces off of them and drilled a hole in some wood rounds that I have leftover from the ornaments that I made last year and inserted the small branches into the wood round to look like a little tree.  I designed some star name tags and hot glued them to the top and then hung some little ornaments from a couple of the branches.  I set the rest of the branches on the table by the tree and added some silver ornaments and bead garlands.  Then folded the napkins into a Christmas tree.

I made a pasta artichoke bake and Parmesan rolls and one of my visiting teachers brought a salad, and then I made mini individual pineapple upside down cakes for dessert.  Because I also have an obsession with anything mini…  🙂  After dinner we had some hot chocolate by the fire while we chatted.  It was a fun night.  I would say it is one of my favorite advent activities, but I realized last night that I say that after almost every single advent activity, haha.  I just love Christmas so much!