Preschool Staff Christmas Party

This past Saturday night was our Christmas party for the preschool staff. It was in the beautiful home of our director, Debi. She graciously hosts it in her home every year. We are told to bring a $5.00 ornament for the ornament swap game. We call it "Dirty Santa", but I believe it is called other names as well.

Here's an idea of what the ornament that I brought looked like ---

I couldn't find a picture of the actual one that I bought, but it looked like these, only it was a glass ball, not a bucket. I loved the feathers at the top of it! I got it at Pier 1. I love their ornaments, and everything else in the store!!!

I brought along my camera to take pics at the party, but ended up only taking pics of Debi's beautiful Christmas decorations!

This is the stairwell, in the foyer, that greets you as you enter the house.

This is the dining room, to the left of the foyer. She had many yummy foods here, for us to enjoy!

Take a look at ALL of these YUMMY desserts that were scattered across her kitchen island!! This was a dessert lover's paradise!! The large gingerbread house is just a decoration, but it looked SO real!



This beautiful fireplace is in the formal living room where we all sat to enjoy our yummy foods and also to have our ornament swap.



I hate that I didn't take any pictures of any of us that were there! I get shy about taking people's pictures, because you never know how they really feel about it. Someone did take mine and David's picture in front of the Christmas tree, but it didn't turn out so well.

Our ornament swap game was a lot of fun. If you've never played "Dirty Santa", it's a fun game to play at a Christmas party! Everyone brings an ornament (or some other cheap) gift and you take turns picking a gift from under the tree (or on the table). You open your gift and show it to the rest of the participants. The next person, in turn, can either take your gift or choose another from under the tree. The game continues around the room with everyone either choosing a new gift, or stealing someone else's! Our game lasted for a while because their were two ornaments that everyone seemed to want!!

This is the ornament that I was lucky to get --

I actually stole him from someone else!! Hahaaa! I love snowmen and the green and red match the rest of my Christmas tree ornaments! I was happy that he wasn't one of the ornaments that everyone wanted!

How do you spell ornament?

My girls are four years apart in age. When they were in early elementary school, one of them received phonics and the other one did not. For whatever reason... the schools pulled the phonics part of learning from the curriculum the year that one of my girls really needed it!! As a result.... one of them is not such a great "reader" or "speller". ---For the sake of embarrassment... I'm going to keep their identity a secret!

I learned last night that my "non-phonics" child was asked how to spell "ornament" at work. So she spelled it -

 O-R-D-A-M-E-N-T.

Her co-workers, then realized "who" it was that had been misspelling this word in their database!

She quickly explained to them her issue with not receiving phonics as a child. They understood, but lovingly continued to tease her about it, which she (thankfully!) didn't seem to mind.

The actual funny part of this story is that my child that DID receive phonics said....

"Well, I know how to spell ornament, but I when I say the word I say.... or-da-ment."

I couldn't help but laugh now and I let them both know (real quick!) that they did NOT learn how to incorrectly say this word from ME, because I say or-na-ment! They tried to tell me that I DO say it like they do, but I know for a fact that I say it the correct way because I have repeated it over and over in my head, just to make sure...

or-na-ment, or-na-ment, or-na-ment.

Yep! I say it the right way!

Maybe they incorrectly learned this word from my mom, who must not have had phonics as a child either, because she mispronounces MANY words!!

The funniest thing that she does is that she adds "er" to any word that ends with an "A". She'll say... "Atlant-er" for "Atlanta" and "Lis-er" for "Lisa". She also adds an "S" to store names, for whatever reason! She'll say... "Walmart-s" for "Walmart" and "K-mart-s" for "K-mart".

I guess I'll have to get my mom to say "ornament" and see how she pronounces it!! **Smile**