As you know, the Smith family celebrates Christmas a little differently. A few years ago, we decided to have themed Christmas parties (you can read about past Christmas celebrations here). This year had the exciting theme of I’ll Be Gnome For Christmas, which means that, yes, we all dressed as gnomes. This was particularly funny because everyone in my family (aside from me and my sister) is around six feet tall. We’re a family of tall gnomes, I suppose.
I’m going to say that I had the most impressive costume, complete with a long white beard. In case you’re interested in making your own gnome costume, you can buy white craft fur at Michael’s, which you can cut into a beard shape and then attach to a red felt hat.
Along with costumes, we had gnome-themed games and food. After much procrastination and debate, we finally decided upon burgers as the food of choice for our gnome Christmas, as they would be grilled outside, perhaps in a garden where gnomes reside. We also dined on salad, chips and salsa, spinach dip, and potato salad. I have to say that eating burgers for Christmas was kind of awesome. Desserts included gnome-shaped sugar cookies, pie, and no-bake cookies, affectionately referred to as “mud plops.”
The real highlight of these themed Christmas extravaganzas are the games. Each year, all of the cousins come up with games to play, along with a $1 gift for the winner of the themed game. My game was called, “Name the garden vegetable,” in which I made a poster with an assortment of obscure vegetables for the cousins to identify. It turns out they aren’t so good at identifying veggies, and Eric won the game with only 6 correct answers out of 10.
My sister’s gnome game involved making cones (or gnome hats) out of paper and then tossing a ball back and forth between the cones. The winning team had to complete the most consecutive passes without dropping the ball. I believe Amanda and Andy won that game, which is no surprise, as Amanda always comes up with (and wins) the tossing games.
Jessica’s game was a rousing game of gnome bowling, with 2-liter bottles decorated as gnomes. We bowled with a styrofoam ball, which was surprisingly challenging. I believe Brannon won that game, knocking down 9 of the 10 gnomes. I think I only hit 3.
Amy always brings some sort of word game, and this year’s was a list of word scrambles. All of the words had something to do with gnomes, like garden, soil, and Gnomeo and Juliet. I think I won this game. It must be all of that Wheel of Fortune I watch for practice.
Eric’s game was Gnome Warfare (a.k.a. paper, rock, scissors). I think Eric uses the same game every year, but calls it something different. All of the cousins who had yet to win prizes collected on this one.
We always have a long photo session, where we take the 3 traditional cousin photos: one arranged by age, one by height, and the ‘Asian Height’ photo (this became a tradition after my aunt mistakenly heard ‘Asian height’ when we said ‘age and height’). I have always been at the end of both the age and height photos, but I’m hoping that the arrival of Jessica and Brannon’s baby will allow me to be taller than someone, at least for a few years.
This year we also took a gnome-themed photo, with all of us standing in the landscaping outside. It was a gnometastic time.
Hope your Christmas celebration was equally exciting!
-Ally
Norma says
You all surely make cute Gnomes. We were searching for party ideas and came across your fun party.
Be well.