Holiday Heaven

If you are planning a wedding and plan to have a unity candle as part of the ceremony, you might want to think outside the box.

Traditionally, the unity candle involves three candles. The bride has one, the groom the other, and their two lighted candles light the third candle. This is done to represent the coming together of the two people to make one unit. In some alternate methods, family members are invited to participate in the unity candle lighting, often the mothers of the bride and groom, or other close members of the family. Each family then lights a candle, and together they light the unity candle to symbolize of the coming together of the families.

Now, there are a few twists you can add to this fairly conventional aspect of a wedding ceremony. You can provide each guest with an unlit candle when they arrive at the ceremony. After the couple lights the unity candle, they can ask the guests to move to the front of the church (or wherever the ceremony is being held) and light their candles with the lighted unity candle. This can take a bit of time and might be best with a smaller guest list. But it is a meaningful way to not only get your guests involved in the ceremony itself, but also symbolize the union of family and friends with the marriage.

If there is a large guest list and it would be a prohibitive waste of time to do a candle lighting involving everyone at the ceremony, some brides and grooms like to bring the unity candle to the reception. Light the candle again and provide each guest with a small votive candle (the candle holder will be on the tables at individual table settings). As guests come into the reception area or hall, they can light their votive and take it to their table to place into the votive holder. This small votive candle can double as a wedding favor, particularly if you decorate or enhance a plain votive candleholder in some way to coordinate with your wedding.

Of course, you can forget having a unity candle at the ceremony altogether. Many brides these days are trying to reduce the length of the ceremony and spend more time planning the reception. In that light, some choose to do away with a unity candle altogether. You can certainly do this, or you can cut it out of the ceremony and make it part of the reception.

To do this, you can use the votive candle option suggested above, or you can simply incorporate the unity candle lighting into the reception activities themselves. For example, you might choose a quiet moment in the reception to have a lighting of the unity candle. It might be during a short prayer prior to the serving of the meal, or right before the cake is cut. In this case, the unity candle can then be used as decoration on the cake table. As the bride and groom cut the cake and pieces are served to guests, the candle can also serve as a reminder of the couple’s new bond and that the bond is shared with all the guests as well.

Although having a unity candle at the wedding or reception isn’t necessary, it is certainly an option that many brides and grooms opt to include. But it’s important to remember that as with so much surrounding wedding planning there are ways to make it unique and interesting and special to the couple getting married.

If you’re hosting a family thanksgiving, you want to create a fun family environment that helps children understand the importance of thankfulness and reminds the adults of this as well.

Since Thanksgiving comes just before what many refer to as the “greedy” season, activities designed to remind people of the bounty in their lives are useful. For example, you might help children understand that while they don’t have everything they want, they do have everything they need.

How do you do this? Several ways. One is to help children create a cornucopia, which will sit on the Thanksgiving table. There are a variety of ways to do this. You can make a papier-mch cornucopia using a balloon as the base to help you get the shape started. You can simply take large piece of poster board and shape them into a cone and fill those with whatever you like. As an extra activity, you can have the children decorate the cornucopia before it gets filled.

Since the idea of the cornucopia is to celebrate a bounty and appreciate that bounty, you can fill it as is traditionally done with squash, corn and the like. You might also ask each member of the family to bring something that represents their personal bounty in life. A new mom might bring a baby blanket to put in the cornucopia while a newly retired grandpa might add a picture of his family, since that’s what’s most important to him. You can discuss the items in the cornucopia basket at the dinner table while enjoying your Thanksgiving feast.

Another family activity that kids like is the thankfulness jar. When each person arrives at dinner, they place a note with something they are thankful for in the jar. Ideally, each person will add more than one item to the jar. At dinner, someone (ideally, the matriarch of patriarch of the family) reads the notes. Everyone tries to figure out who wrote which note. The items can range from the serious (someone who struggled with an illness in the previous year might be thankful for life, quite simply) to the silly (the new mom might be thankful there’s a Starbucks within 5 minutes of her home). Kids enjoy adding their own touches to the thankfulness jar and their responses are often a surprise to the adult family members.

Some families have several tables set about at Thanksgiving. Many people buy professional floral arrangements to decorate the tables. You can make a game out of it to figure out who’s going to get to bring home the table arrangement to their home. You can do the old wedding thing and simply put a number on the bottom of the centerpiece and have someone’s chair match that number or you can make a game and perhaps create a trivia game out of Thanksgiving facts. For example, questions might look like this:
*How many turkeys are cooked on Thanksgiving throughout the US?
*Why are turkeys called turkeys?
*Which president set aside the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving?

Be sure you research and know the answers and then quiz everyone. This is a great way to pass the time while everyone is waiting for the feast to be ready. Just tell the winners they can’t take the centerpieces until dinner is over!
You can have a similar game before dessert. Create a family trivia game and quiz family members before dessert. Only the people who get the answers right get to have their dessert. Everyone else has to keep trying until they get their trivia question right. Questions can range from the silly to the sublime. They might look something like this:
*Who got popcorn stuck in her braces at 12?
*Which man here wore boots with big holes in them until he was 20 and could buy his own?
*Whose grandparents immigrated to the US from Ireland?
*Which boy here got suspended from school for riding his bike into the classroom?

Family is at the core of the Christmas season, so creating fun memories with your family is always at the top of the must-do list this time of year.

What fun activities can you incorporate into your family life that makes Christmas memorable and fun? Plenty, really. There are the traditional and the things a little bit out of the box.

Think back to your childhood and Christmas time in your house. Are there particular memories that are clearer than others? Those are likely the traditions your parents created for you and your siblings. Trying to create traditions in your own home with your own children is one way to make Christmas fun, exciting and memorable. Perhaps it’s decorating cookies, or making gingerbread houses. Maybe when you were younger your mom always had something yummy smelling coming from the kitchen. You can create the same tradition by simply keeping potpourri warmed and smelling nice, if you don’t have the time to bake frequently.

If you want to do a fun family activity in the kitchen, but baking’s not your thing, you can make a variety of other gift items in your kitchen. The kids love making chocolate and candy covered pretzel sticks, and you can pair those with homemade hot cocoa mix to give as gifts.

Be sure to incorporate music into your family’s traditions. How about some family fun singing Christmas carols or creating your own family music CD? Record your family singing Christmas carols and use that CD as your music CD for the holidays. If you all are particularly talented, you could make these look pretty and give them as gifts.

Many families like to cut down their own Christmas tree. This is a really fun family activity that can add a lot to the Christmas season. Christmas tree farms are located just about everywhere. Check into a local grower’s group for locations. You simply show up, grab a saw (this is mom or dad’s job) and go hunting. Depending on the location of the tree farm, you might walk only a short distance, or you might have to hike up and down hills and far into the farm’s reaches to find just the right tree.

To add even more fun to this activity, create another family tradition that will annually go with the tree cutting. It can be as simple as also having lunch (at the same place each year) and picking up candy to eat in the car on the way home. You might also add a shopping excursion to the day; after the tree is safe at home in a bucket of water, you might all go shopping as a family for some new ornaments.

Other fun family activities can include annual visits to certain places in your community. Does your town have an annual “Christmas tree lane” where all the homes on one street decorate (sometimes in an over the top fashion) for the holidays? You can make a tradition of driving down the street each year, or walking the entire street, if the weather allows. Walking gives the kids a chance to see some of the details of the various dcor items.

Many children think hot cocoa is an essential part of the Christmas season. If that’s the case with yours, you could start a fun family activity each year where you make a big batch of hot cocoa mix at the start of the season. Let the kids have a small cup each night before bed during the month of December and closer to Christmas, add special items to the hot cocoa, like mini marshmallows one night and whipped cream another. Be sure to leave this family-made hot cocoa for Santa on Christmas Eve!

At a certain age, children enjoy decorating their room for the holidays. One fun family Christmas activity is to encourage this decoration by letting the kids shop for items to put in their rooms and letting them do the decorating. Be sure to take a picture of them in their decorated room each year. They’ll enjoy looking at the pictures year after year.

It used to be that families had no rules about gift buying. Everyone bought for everyone else, and gifts were exchanged when the family all got together somewhere during the Christmas season.

These days, it’s more common for people to draw a name out of a hat or get assigned a person to buy for. Or the family creates a type of “white elephant” exchange instead of having family members buy for individuals in particular. So, what many families need is a fun way to exchange the gifts, whether they be for a specific person or whether they are ‘white elephant” type gifts.

If the family members drew names, there are several fun things you can do. The gifts can be hidden and clues given as to the location of the gifts. So, if you arrive at grandma’s house with your gift for Aunt Martha, you might tuck her gift into a kitchen cabinet. Then you’d create a series of clue as to here it is. You might say, “Cinnamon lurks here” or “it’s the hub of the home, but not always the home of the hub”.

The clues can be silly or deadly serious. They can be designed so someone will know where to find their present in just minutes, or designed so that it takes a series of clues to get someone right to their gift. If the group is small or the house particularly large, and the participants have the time you can always create a hunt where more than one tip is left and one tip leads to another, which leads to another until the gift is finally found.

Why should the kids have all the fun? Create some fun gift exchange ideas for adults. Whether the family is doing a name draw and exchanging regular gifts or not, you can have some good family fun with a white elephant gift exchange. How about a themed white elephant gift exchange? If the family is into fishing, you could create that as a theme. Everyone must bring a gift related to fishing (this could be anything from sporting goods items, to a singing bass that goes on the wall). It could be a hand held electronic fishing game or a board game with fishing as a theme.

In that same vein, you could create a “cooking” white elephant exchange or a camping themed gift exchange. Again, it’s more about what will please members of the family than anything. Then create some fun games for the exchange itself. Perhaps everyone draws a number and gets to pick their gifts from the pile in the middle based on their number. Perhaps you begin the game that way, but then also people to ’steal’ someone else’s gift if they choose.

You can require that the gift recipient shakes a gift, studies a gift and makes a good, educated guess as to its contents before opening it. If they are right, they can “steal” someone else’s gift, but if they are wrong, they keep theirs. Add to the silliness factor by playing a card game and dictating that people can’t get their gift and open it until they win a hand in the card game (ideally something fairly quick like poker or rummy).

The idea behind any family gift exchange should be enjoying each other’s company and enjoying the Christmas spirit. As long as it’s fun and engaging, there’s no reason why the adults in the family can’t have some fun games for exchanging gifts just the kids might.

The engagement party is a time when the families of the couple will get to know one another. In some cases, this might be the first meeting between the two families or groups of friends and any icebreaker activity will be a welcome event.

In that light, whoever plans the engagement party (likely the bride’s family, but it can be the engaged couple or anyone else who wants to plan the party) should plan a few games and activities designed to help everyone get to know everyone else.

First up is a trivia game. Create a “Trivial Pursuit” type game with questions about the bride and groom’s lives. You might contain the questions to just facts and events relating to both the bride and groom (such as how long did it take her to say “yes” when he asked, where did he propose, where did they meet, etc), or you can include questions pertaining to their lives outside of each other and before they met each other. Not only can this be fun, but also it’s an entertaining way for people to get to know each other and the engaged couple better.

One popular icebreaker that’s used at corporate functions and company parties can also work really well at engagement parties. Tape a card to each person’s back and encourage him or her to work the room, mingle with everyone and particularly try to get to know someone they have never met before. Before moving on to someone else, be sure to make a comment about the person on the card on his or her back. Partiers write an impression of that person, such as “she seems sweet” or “he knows a lot about the weather”.

This icebreaker ends when the mingling session is over. The cards are then read one by one and people not only get to know each other better, but enjoy hearing all the comments people made about them. Try to ensure that comments are complimentary or somehow presented in a positive light. Hurtful comments, obviously, are not appropriate.

If this is truly the first time many of the guests have met, then another fun game involving the wearing of cards might be in order. In this game, each guest wears a card on their front that has their name on the front and a number on the back. They don’t share with anyone what their number is. Guests mingle and chat and get to know each other over the course of the evening.

Toward the end of the evening, the cards are flipped over and the number side is shown. Everyone gets a piece of paper and writes the numbers on the paper, then tries to correspond the name of someone with their number. This fun game can be hard for people who are bad with names, but it’s fun nonetheless.

For an activity that doesn’t put people on the spot quite so much, consider letting the already marrieds help out the to-be marrieds. Place two pieces of posterboard on the wall and mark them “advice from women” and “advice from men”. Now is the time to offer advice about wedding planning, not about being married. That advice can come later. Encourage guests to offer their own wedding planning advice. The advice from older people at the party could be decidedly different from the younger couples in the group, making for an enlightening group of comments.

If you are willing to put a little time and energy into a Christmas game, this one is surefire hit. It’s called “dress Santa” and it’s funny and silly and worth having a camera round to record the fun. You might even want a camcorder as well.

Here’s how it works. Create a dress-up box with a Santa costume and other items that Santa might or might not wear. You want to have a full-bore Santa costume, so you can either rent one or purchase one if you think it will get used years after. They can be found for around $100 or maybe a little less if you buy one at a costume shop that’s used.

You’ll put the Santa suit in a large suitcase or trunk. Be sure you have as many Santa items as possible; for example, you want to have a pair of boots, gloves, a big belt, etc. Then in the trunk or suitcase, mix in other items, like jewelry, hats, socks, shoes and feather boas. It’s probably obvious where this is going.

At the Christmas party, someone volunteers to play the game. Ideally, you’ll have several volunteers so you can time people and award a prize for fastest or most interesting, or whatever works based for your party.

The chosen person gets blindfolded and stripped down to their bare essentials. No, it’s not that kind of game, but if a woman is wearing a sweater over a T-shirt and shoes, the shoes and the sweater can be removed, so she has less on her to begin with. Once the person is blindfolded, begin timing them. Tell them they must dress Santa as quickly as possible in his Santa suit only, nothing else. To spice up the game and make it more interesting, be sure to include some items in the trunk that might feel like Santa items, but aren’t. For example, you’ll have Santa’s black gloves in the trunk, but also include a pair or two of garden gloves, and Santa has a belt, but you could include other belts as well. Be sure to include several hats (even a princess hat, which might feel like a Santa hat to a disoriented participant).

Once Santa is dressed, stop the timer and take the blindfold off. Everyone can get a good laugh at the result. Santa might have his suit on, but he might also be wearing a robe. Or he might be in his suit, but with garden gloves, a rhinestone belt and a princess hat. Be sure to take pictures of your good sport and move to the next participant. It’s better if the other players aren’t in the room, since many might remember the various items in the trunk and make mental notes about what to ignore and what to use.

After the Santas are done with their dressing and the requisite pictures have been taken, decide on a winner. Is the winner the Santa who dressed in 45 seconds, or the one that wore the garden gloves, princess hat and rhinestone belt combination? It’s a tough call, but a winner must be crowned, so to speak. You can award prizes (Santa hats filled with candy are fun) or you can keep this all in fun and let the good sports know the fun is in the silly playing.

As brides get more and more creative in planning their weddings, locations weddings are becoming more and more popular. Although this might result in a smaller guest list, it can also result in some fun opportunities for activities.

Many brides like to have their weddings seaside, so they move the festivities to a beach locale, either on their local coast or somewhere more exotic like Jamaica or the Bahamas. In any event, there are several activities that can be planned around this theme. If the wedding is also a weekend event where guests will be around for more than just the wedding, the bride can plan a sailing excursion. Charter a boat for a day and bring your guests out on the water to relax, rejuvenate, and perhaps enjoy a meal.

If the wedding is in the Caribbean, how about a cooking demonstration? The bride and groom can arrange for the wedding guests to enjoy a complimentary cooking demonstration put on by the hotel or a local cook. Since much of the food the guests eat while visiting for the wedding will be different than what they eat at home, they might enjoy learning how to prepare it for home enjoyment.

Say the wedding is in Hawaii, another popular destination wedding location. Here, you can plan several activities around the location. For example, what about a luau? This could even take the place of a more formal or conventional sit-down rehearsal dinner.

In Hawaii, guests will enjoy a hula lesson. Depending on the age of your guests, be sure there is enough time between the wedding and the lesson for the resting of aching bones, in case there are any.

At the wedding itself, there are many ways to incorporate the location into the ceremony itself. At a beachside reception, you can play “pass the shell”, where a large shell is passed around and guests “listen” for some advice from the other world. Once they get a piece of advice (really something they think of themselves) they share it with the bride and groom, either verbally, or it can be written into a book for the couple.

Other pre-wedding activities can include guided tours, shopping excursions and wine tasting activities (if applicable). If you choose to include any of these activities keep in mind that the bride and groom (or their families) are expected to pay for the bulk of them. If you arrange a sailing excursion, for example, you are expected to pick up the tab for the trip. Do not tell people ahead of time that the activity will be x dollars. It’s likely that won’t sit well with them.

Since one of the great benefits of the destination wedding is that only your closest friends and family will likely surround you, you can plan some meaningful activities that you wouldn’t plan if the wedding were a larger event. For example, you might plan a slumber party night with close friends that includes movies, popcorn and drinks in your hotel room, villa or cottage, depending on where the wedding is held.

Of course, if you plan a destination wedding, for some people this might double as their vacation. In that event, you might not want to schedule too many activities but instead let people find their own activities and entertainment both before and after the wedding.

Dancing is an essential component at most wedding receptions. We look forward to the couple’s “first dance” and the bride’s special dance with her father. It’s also a place to get loose and funky, if you’re a guest or a member of the wedding party.

But what if the wedding planners decided to add some fun and surprise to the dance floor by adding fun activities there? This doesn’t mean a rousing version of the “Bunny Hop”, which, while maybe essential, is hardly unique.

There are, however, many fun games and activities you can add to your dance floor activities that are sure to be a hit.

Try a fun game of the “chicken dance”. Ok, so that doesn’t sound too original. But if most of your guests are just sitting at their tables, watching a few brave couples dancing, or just finishing their meals, you might want to get everyone up and having fun. Try this game.

The DJ announces a number. Everyone looks under his or her chair, where there is a number. Depending on the number of guests at the wedding, there might be only numbers “1″ and “2″ or more, up to 5.

So, say the DJ announces number “4″. Each person checks under their chair to see what their number is. These numbers can be written simply on a piece of masking tape and affixed to the underside of the chairs when the reception is being set up. Each “4″ in this scenario will head to the dance floor to do the chicken dance with the other “4s”. Not only does this get people out of their chairs and on to the dance floor, they get to know other wedding reception guests they might not otherwise know.

One dance floor activity that’s gaining popularity is to bring in a dance teacher for the wedding reception. As a kind of pre-dance activity, the teacher will quickly walk people through their paces on the dance floor, perhaps teaching a bit of the waltz or, for something completely different, a little bit of the tango, before the music officially begins and dancing commences.

Having a dance teacher do a bit of teaching not only livens up the reception right from the start, but it gets people out on the dance floor who might otherwise be too self-conscious normally to get out there and let it all hang out. And practically speaking, it will likely make the wedding guests feel more confident in their skills before the “official” dancing begins.

Another fun activity to get everyone on the dance floor, including even the most reticent, is something you can refer to as the “snowball” dance. This is a good way to jumpstart the dancing at the beginning of the evening.

Here’s how the “snowball” dance works. The wedding party, bride and groom included, will head to the dance floor for a fun dance. The music for this dance should be fast, something with a disco beat or a fast song that most people have at least a passing familiarity with. After a bit of wedding party dancing, the music stops. The female members of the wedding party move into the crowd and bring back one male each. The male members of the wedding party do the same, but they bring in female guests. The dancing then begins again. This is repeated until all the guests are dancing. It’s truly a snowball effect!

If you ask children what their favorite holiday is, the most likely response from most children will be Christmas, with Halloween coming in a close second. Some children will choose Halloween as their first favorite. But this holiday, with all its goblins and ghouls, likely makes the top two favorite holidays on most children’s’ lists.

To that end, then, it’s always fun to have a raucous Halloween class party. With lots of fun games and activities, and plenty of candy for prizes, it’s sure to be a hit with kids of all school ages.

For younger children how about a game of pumpkin bowling? Find some of those inexpensive plastic pumpkin treat buckets and stack them up on a hard floor. You can stack them as high as you like, but you have to start with at least three buckets. If you get many buckets, you can make a pyramid out of them. Find some lightweight plastic balls - plastic bowling balls are excellent for this. And let the kids go bowling! The kids love knocking over the pumpkin heads and all the kids who play should get a prize for this game.

Kids of all ages enjoy making mummies out of themselves and their friends. Here’s how this works. You bring in toilet paper, lots and lots of toilet paper. Divide the kids into teams of 2. When you begin timing the kids, they must wrap their friend up in the toilet paper, mummy style. The first team who is all wrapped wins. The child who’s wrapped up like a mummy can then break out of the toilet paper wrap with a scary “roar” and the game begins again so the other child can also be wrapped. Be sure to play some spooky Halloween music while this game is being played to add to the atmosphere.

Circle time! Have all the kids get in a circle and begin a spooky story. The story can begin with the classic, “It was a dark and spooky night…” and then the person next in the circle continues the story. Each child adds something to the story as it moves around the circle. If the children are young, you can keep the story on the straight and narrow by indicating no gruesome elements will be allowed. If the kids are older, you can decide how scary the story can be. Be aware that children in higher elementary grades will not only like their stories fairly scary and gruesome, but some might even add “booger” and “snot” and “throw up” elements to their story. You can set the rules ahead of time to prepare for this type of storytelling.

No game has held onto children’s interests for more years than the classic “musical chairs”. This version includes playing Halloween music (think “Monster Mash” or “Thriller” by Michael Jackson) and asking the kids to act as spooky and scary as they can while they race around the chairs. You can up the rules depending on the ages of the children. For example, for children in the lower grades you can tell them to just walk around the chairs until the music stops. As they get older, you can add challenging elements, such as make scary faces as you walk around the chairs, do the monster mash (whatever that means to the individual kid) and other things like that. You’re sure to get some creative responses.

Kids love cakewalks, but they aren’t practical in the classroom. You could, however, have a treat walk. Save enough space in the classroom for this one. Again, play some Halloween-themed music and have the kids walk around in a circle as they do for cakewalks during other school events. Instead of having them walk onto number squares or circles, however, you can have them walking onto cardboard discs that include pictures of ghosts, monsters and the like. The person running the cakewalk will stop the music and pull a matching picture out of a pumpkin head. Instead of calling “#14″, for example, as the winner of the cakewalk, it will be “ghost head” or “monster mouth”.

Decorating the Christmas tree is an event that most members of any family look forward to. It not only is a time to reflect and remember where the various ornaments came from or who made them, it is also an exciting time that really brings Christmas right into the home.

There are a variety of activities you can incorporate into bring the Christmas tree into your home. Some families enjoy singing “Oh Christmas Tree” as the tree is brought into the home. Make a fun activity of this whereby everyone has to come up with an original verse to the song (since few know the actual words). This can keep everyone entertained while someone else works to get the tree standing up straight.

Once the tree is in a stand and ready to be decorated, make a game out of the ornaments. Put all the homemade ornaments aside and work with those first. Start with the first family member and ask them who made the ornament, where did it come from? Once the details are out of the way, ask the crafter (likely a child) if they remember making the ornament. If you’re the parent, tell the child what you thought when you first saw the ornament. This is fun, since it reminds children that the things they make and bring home are meaningful to the parents.

There is always one ornament that is just ugly, or plain silly. Play “hot potato” with that ornament. Whoever gets stuck with the ugly ornament has to say one nice thing about it, such as “well, there’s a lot of glitter on it and that’s pretty”, or “Dougie made it, so I like it”. It’s a silly way to remind children to find good in everything. It might even remind them that things are just things. This is a good lesson for this time of year.

Some people use an advent calendar to count down the days until Christmas, and this is how it’s traditionally done, but there is one fun activity sure to be a hit with children. Similar to the concept in Germany (where the advent calendar originated) this involves providing one small gift for children every day until Christmas. In Germany, it’s only done for several days before Christmas, but you can do it for the 24 days of the month until Christmas arrives.

Buy tiny handled gift bags at the craft store. Buy 1 for each of your children. Have the children decorate the bags, and on each of the 24 bags, have them place a number as well, 1 through 24. As you decorate the tree, find space for each of these little bags. Because they have handles, they can hang right on the tree like an ornament, or you can tie ribbon on the handles so they have a more graceful swing. Each night, fill the right bag with a tiny prize or gift. So if it’s the night of December 14, you’ll take bag #15 (all the bags with earlier numbers will be gone) and put some little trinket in it. It might be a piece of candy, a tiny ornament for your child’s own tree, a tiny car or small eraser. The idea here is that it’s a small gift, but come morning, that’s the first activity your children will engage in - discovering what little treat you left for them the night before.