LIEP Christmas Party 2012

On the afternoon of Wednesday, December 5, our Loyola Intensive English Program students gathered in our lounge area for a Christmas party!

We began with four projects, culminating in painted Christmas tree ornaments, hand-made Christmas cards, delicious Christmas chocolate chip cookes, and tasty spiced Christmas nuts!

Those who painted Christmas ornaments had a variety of shapes and colors to choose from.

A plate of plain shapes, waiting to be painted!

Painting a Santa's hat ornament

Once the ornaments were ready, we chose a favorite as our winning Christmas ornament!

Tram Ngoc Thuy "Candy" Nguyen shows off her winning teddy bear ornament!

The Christmas card creators worked with a variety of decorative materials to create beautiful Christmas cards.

Materials for Christmas cards

A set of beautiful hand-made Christmas cards!

While some were painting ornaments and others were creating Christmas cards, two teams were preparing cookie and nut treats. Here are the delicious results!

A sheet of just-baked Christmas chocolate chip cookies!

A pan of tasty spiced Christmas nuts!

Our Christmas party also included the Jewish Hanukkah tradition of spinning the dreidel. Coins are placed in the center of the table, the dreidel is spun, and coins are won or lost depending on how the dreidel lands.

We place coins on the table. Ours are chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil.

The dreidel spins.

We watch to see how the dreidel will land.

We also played MERRY CHRISTMAS Scramble. This game involves seeing how many words we could form using the letters in MERRY CHRISTMAS. Try it! How did you do?

Then Christmas Trivia tested our knowledge about Christmas. Try some of our questions! Can you answer these?

1. Name two of Santa's reindeer.
2. What do children in the United States leave out for Santa to find on Christmas Eve?
3. What do children in the United States leave out for Santa's reindeer?
4. What are three other names for Santa Claus?
5. How much does the average family in the United States spend on Christmas gifts?
6. How many Christmas trees are sold for people's homes in the United States every Christmas?

Scroll down to the end of the post for the answers.

Our LIEP Christmas party was fun, tasty, informative, and creative! Our huge thanks to the party organizers, LIEP instructors Jess Haley and Christina Indovina!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

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Answers to Christmas Trivia questions.

1. Santa's reindeer are Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, Rudolph.
2. Children leave out cookies and milk for Santa.
3. Children leave out carrots for Santa's reindeer.
4. Other names for Santa Claus are Kris Kringle, Papa Noel, Saint Nicholas, and Jolly Old Elf.
5. The average family spend $800 on Christmas presents.
6. 37,000,000 Christmas trees are sold.