Christmas Party for the G~i~R~l~S

I have been labeled as the person who always initiates girls nights for a particular group of friends in Nacogdoches...you always need that person in every group, right?  When I lived there, I was usually the one inviting all the girls over for dinner/wine, or getting the group together at our favorite sushi restaurant, etc.  I love themes though....and Christmas has to be my favorite.  This year, I have looked forward to Christmas for so many reasons...we are in our new house, we will have my step-son, Noah, this year, and it's our first Christmas as a married couple.  I can remember my first Christmas with Justin as a couple...we had been together for a long while before that Christmas, but it was the first time we actually spent it together.  We were opening gifts with his family and I got a little bitty box....my heart was racing.  I thought, "This is WAY too soon to be getting engaged!!"  But we girls know that feeling when you get the little bitty box!!!! Anyway, he obviously thought it was WAY too soon too because it was a beautiful, sparkly pair of diamond studs...which I still wear everyday.  Finally, several YEARS later, he surprised me on a random Wednesday in October with those 4 little words and a bling, bling diamond RING!!! I was overjoyed!!  We married in May and I have been looking so forward to the holidays in our home and with our traditions.
Just because I moved away from my Nac-girls, I still wanted to host a Christmas party for them and invite them to our home.  As much as I love to cook and entertain, I decided to cheat a little and I ordered a couple of items  from restaurants....I'm glad I did though because I ended up spending the entire day on cooking, cleaning, and last minute details.  In Marshall, we have an awesome little deli called Central Perks that has the BEST chicken salad EVER!!!  If you are ever in the area, look it up and order the chicken salad....you won't be disappointed!  I also ordered spinach artichoke dip from Chilis....it's just a favorite of mine, so I thought, "why screw it up?"  I did make my mom's famous truffles:

These are simple in a tedious kind of way...I only say a handful of cuss words while making these.  All you do is bake a box cake (any flavor you want...I used chocolate).  While the cake is still hot, you stir in a can of icing (any flavor you want...I used chocolate again). Stir until the icing is mixed all througout the cake.  Then, you ball up the cake/icing mixture and put in the refrigerator to cool.  Once cooled, you melt a package of almond bark....again, i used chocolate and use a toothpick to dip the balls into the melted almond bark.  Let those stand long enough to harden, then take out the toothpicks.  Then melt the white almond bark and put into a ziploc baggie and cut a small corner of the baggie to drizzle the white almond bark over the balls.  Of course, you can do the white on bottom and the chocolate on top...and you could always add food coloring to the white bark, but that takes even more patience and these little suckers already make me cuss!

I saw peppermint almond bark in the Williams Sonoma magazine the other day and I thought it looked so beautiful....and of course, I thought, "I can make that!" So I just melted chocolate almond bark first and spread it over a cookie sheet and let it cool in the fridge, then did the same with the white.  Then I sprinkled crushed peppermints over the hot, white almond bark so it would stick.  Cooled in fridge.  The hard part was breaking this stuff up!!!

Here's the famous chicken salad!!

My friends, Karen and her baby Harper, Chelsey, me, and Melody.

Karen and Harper, Chelsey, me and Melissa.