Our Christmas Party

We decided to go ahead with our Christmas party at the house Saturday night.

All day Friday I had been baking, baking, baking......dozens of cookies for our party. We had invited a lot of people in the neighborhood and a few other friends. We had received quite a few replies from people saying they could not come...a lot of people were scheduled to leave for the holidays....so we had no idea how many people would be coming. I had baked snowballs, peanut butter, chocolate chip and sugar cookies.

I had taken the last batch of cookies out of the oven around 8:00 p.m. Friday night. Around 8:30 was when we had to rush Socrates to the emergency vet.

Neither one of us slept much Friday night.......Saturday morning we were up before the sun. We decided we might as well go ahead with our party. Andrew went out and did some shopping while I stayed home and cleaned the house. When he got back we set up the tables and the kitchen.

Andrew had set up our little Dutch village the week before...

 Last year we had so many people in the house we could barely walk! This year, smaller crowd......we still had a lot of fun!  I had made some gluhwein, which turned out pretty yummy!  We had been collecting corks all year and had people guess how many corks in the glass container...for a prize (bottle of champagne!)-Hans won that!  Then we had Carmen pull names out of the hat for other prizes. We had chocolates, a gift card and some beer with glasses as prizes.

 Our friend Hetty made this for us!  Sooooo funny and sweet!!! Those pictures of us were taken on Queen's Day last April!

 Sammy was getting upset being left upstairs in the bedroom by himself, so Andrew brought him down to be with us and kept him on the leash so he wouldn't get into anything or knock anything on the coffee table over!

We had soooo many cookies left over (I was able to talk a few people into taking some home with them!), I had to find a place to donate them. So, Hetty came to the rescue. She gave me a few names of places I could bring them.....one of which was Sint Janskliniek here in Haarlem. Andrew and I walked there with three huge trays of cookies to give them. We arrived just in time for 'high tea', so it was a perfect time for them to serve the cookies! I was so happy to be able to give them to people who could enjoy them!

The walk to get to the Sint Janskliniek was almost a mile, and it was pouring down rain the entire walk there and back. Andrew had not brought an umbrella, thinking his coat was waterproof...but by the time we got home he was soaked to the bone!

The rest of the day into the evening we stayed home and relaxed. The rain, naturally, stopped as soon as we got home!