Whither Thou Goest: Missionary parties

We sure do a lot of celebrating in December with our family's birthdays and Christmas. One of our traditions is the missionary Christmas party. We celebrated a bit earlier than usual this year.

This year we had several families less since one family is on furlough, one family is back in the US awaiting the birth of their second child, one family in the US for other reasons, and one single lady was also home on furlough. We are only all together with these families at Thanksgiving and Christmas parties, otherwise most everyone is involved in separate ministries. Still, with several families missing we had seven adults and sixteen children.

We planned the menu to be easy and simple with sub sandwiches, chips, a veggie tray, and desserts.

Refreshment table.

Food table (with our daughter caught eating again!)

Dessert table.

As always these missionary parties are a chance to relax and enjoy Christian fellowship.

While the children were busy watching Christmas videos and cartoons,

the adults enjoyed a game of Headbanz. My kids received this game from a friend of mine who sends us packages after I recently asked her to send us a new game for them to play at home. The kids love it and it was a big hit at our Christmas party.

James and Cassie Dean

Bonnie Hearron

As a last event for the day, the children and adults enjoyed opening gifts. We exchange names each year. For the last several years we have exchanged family names for the children. This means we give a board game as a gift to all of the children in the family whose name we drew instead of individual gifts for each child. They seem to enjoy this and it saves the parents a bit of money since there are lots of children around here!