New Year's Eve Party!

In the 30 Before 30 list I posted yesterday, "host a New Year's Eve party" was #1. I've actually been working on the list for a while, so as NYE approached I started thinking... why should I wait until closer to thirty when we could just do it now? 


So we did! We hosted a NYE party at our house complete with food and drinks and party hats and fun. I loved it. Added bonus: a large number of people (many of whom have never seen the new house) coming over is a GREAT motivator to make you really clean the entire house!

For drinks, we had beer, wine, soda, champagne for toasting at midnight, and a yummy champagne punch that will now be added to my "hosting bridal showers" go-to list (recipe to come!).

The food lineup included the following: pizza puffs with pizza sauce, toasted ravioli with marinara sauce, potato chips and french onion dip, tortilla chips and salsa, mini caprese bites, veggies and garlic ranch dressing, baked brie with green pepper jelly and apple slices and crackers, red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, and strawberry cheesecake bites!

(pizza puffs - these were the last thing to come out of the oven, so I didn't get a photo of them on the table!)

(veggies and garlic ranch)

(toasted raviolis with marinara sauce)

(strawberry cheesecake bites)

(red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting)

(I love the silver decorating sugar... perfect for NYE!)

(caprese bites - cherry tomatoes, basil, and fresh mozzarella drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar)

(potato chips and french onion dip)

(baked brie, apples, and crackers)

(Jeff actually made this... baked brie is becoming a specialty of his!)

We put all the food in the dining room (with little black cardstock labels) and decorated with a package of NYE decorations from Party City - a 2012 centerpiece, hanging black and gold spheres, and big "2012" numbers on the wall.

We put the beer and soda on the back patio in coolers, and used a counter in the kitchen for the punch, wine, and glasses. We decorated with the rest of the Party City decorations here (another centerpiece, a 2012 sign, and a gold star garland hung along the backsplash).

(Jeff's Grandma gave me this milk glass punch bowl... isn't it just lovely? I love it because it's beautiful and useful, but even more because of all the family history behind it. It has a set of 12 matching cups too, but I figured plastic was better for a NYE shindig.)

Haha... when I look at this photo it just looks to me like a battle between the champagne glasses and the wine glasses. May the best stemware win!

We bought a "party pack" of hats and necklaces and noise-makers and set them all out on the coffee table. There were two kinds of hats (the cone-shaped kind, and the tiara kind)... they were supposed to be for guys and girls, respectively... but for some reason the tiaras ended up being popular with everyone, male and female. Haha!

This is the only photo I took after people started arriving... it's my sister, me, and my friend Emily (who also happens to be Jeff's little brother's girlfriend). 

We're already talking about what we'll do next year... I'm a big fan of hosting NYE! It was great to have something to plan/do/look forward to after all the Christmas festivities were over, and it was really nice to not worry about driving across Houston and being places on time and such on New Year's Eve. We did have quite a bit of clean-up after everyone left, but it was really fun! I'm hoping for a bigger and better party next year!