Win this very festive set!

Setting and Setup

Personally, we love the idea of a Girls Night In for New Years Eve. Not only is it inexpensive, compared to going out on the town that night, but we find our girlfriends tend to be more relaxed when we’re all just hanging out at somebody’s home. Keep it small and intimate, and if your girlfriends have far to drive, consider offering your couch or guest room for the night. You may find yourself with an impromptu sleepover on your hands, but you can handle it!

Invitations

You could always phone up the gals or send a festive evite, but why not hand-deliver some homemade “crackers” to set a party tone and let your gal pals know that you really want their company? These aren’t too hard to make, according to this great step-by-step article. (The article has you actually making your own wrapping with hand-picked photos, but you can just use any bright wrapping paper.) Just write the invitation details on a piece of festive paper, roll it up and slip it inside the tube along with some confetti. If you don’t have enough time to do this as an invitation, you can try it for a fun party activity (see below).

Food and Drink

The Girlfriends-in-Chief were lucky enough to tour the headquarters of The Pampered Chef with our Chicagonista gal pals and we were treated to a sampling of the recipes in their Easy and Impressive Appetizers recipe collection. You could easily prepare a gorgeous spread of appetizers using nothing else but this book. And, here’s what’s so great about Pampered Chef recipes: They are specially developed for home cooks and rigorously tested by staff chefs, so they are practically foolproof! That is important when you’re having a party and you don’t feel like “experimenting” on your guests.

These recipes are fun and simple to make; so feel free to let your girlfriends help in the kitchen. Why not select a few dishes to make together? Seriously, these are some good recipes. Steak Crostini with Chive-Cream Sauce? Prosciutto Spirals With Balsamic Glaze? Savory Pecan-Crusted Blue Cheese Bites? Your girlfriends will love them! You can also search the Pampered Chef website for dozens of tested appetizer recipes.

To drink? A signature cocktail for the evening is always a nice touch. Pampered Chef has a great recipe for Raspberry Tequila Sangria, which is pretty, festive, and delicious. Please drink responsibly, girlfriends!

Connecting Activities

Here are some things you can do to add some structure, meaning and fun to your New Year’s Eve bash:

-Do a “year in review,” recapping the year’s funniest, most important, or most memorable moments with your girlfriends. If you’ve been having regular girlfriend dates throughout the year, then you should have lots of memories to share. This is a great time to get out photos taken during the year, too. If you don’t have that many shared memories of 2009, then let each girlfriend talk about her own funniest, most embarrassing, most important, or favorite moment of the year. It’s a great way to learn more about each other.

-Write your New Year’s Resolution on a slip of paper and put it into a bowl. Take turns drawing out slips, reading them aloud and trying to guess whose resolution it is. (No one said they have to be serious, though they can be.)

-Assign Resolution Buddies to help each other stay true to your intentions for the New Year. Read more about this idea here.

-Make “crackers” (as mentioned above) but have inside them a “fortune” for the New Year. These can be funny or sweet. Here’s a list of fortunes to get you started (these are a little bland, but you can “girlfriend” them up!)

-Get one of the new DVD “Scene-it” games and play, just for fun. The 1980s trivia version looks like a blast! Or, play What’s a Dame to Do? for lots of girlfriendly laughs!

-Watch the ball drop, of course. Instead of kisses at midnight, how about a group hug?

-Put on some tunes and dance! A new year is beginning, after all, and you have FRIENDS. There is no better reason to celebrate!

Party Favors

Give each girlfriend a fun 2010 wall calendar (they’re on sale already!) with your monthly girlfriend dates already marked in it. Use the opportunity to assign each girlfriend a month or two to plan the get-together.

And Now For the Giveaway:

Pampered Chef has generously given us this adorable ice bucket and cocktail shaker. The Pampered Chef entertaining products are very attractive and highly functional, and these are two great examples. They feature double-wall design to minimize condensation. The shaker has a snug silicone seal and a 1-oz jigger cap for easy measuring. The cute dots pattern coordinates with their Dots Stemware and Martini Glasses. Want to win this for your own New Year’s Eve party? Then here’s what you must do:

1. Leave a comment on this post. That’s it. (It’s so easy. Our holiday gift to you!) Will you get extra points for saying something girlfriendly, or sharing your New Year’s Eve plans, or your resolution to spend more time with your girlfriends? Nope, but do it anyway.  ”Pick me!” gets a little boring.

-Retweet AND leave a comment saying so for an extra entry.

-Blog about it AND leave a comment saying so for an extra entry.

That’s it! This is another quickie, so contest will close at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, December 27. The winner will be chosen at random from all eligible entries. Watch your email Monday Dec 28. You must respond same day. If we can reach you in time, you’ll have your shaker and ice bucket in time for New Year’s Eve! U.S. shipping addresses only please. Good luck, girlfriends!

]]> http://www.girlfriendcelebrations.com/celebration-ideas/new-years-eve-appetizer-party-and-pampered-chef-giveaway/feed/ 58 http://www.girlfriendcelebrations.com/celebration-ideas/sheckys-girls-night-out-our-video-and-report/ http://www.girlfriendcelebrations.com/celebration-ideas/sheckys-girls-night-out-our-video-and-report/#comments Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:48:37 +0000 Dawn http://www.girlfriendcelebrations.com/?p=735

As you may recall, we gave away tickets to Shecky’s Girls Night Out in Chicago a few weeks ago. We also had a chance to meet some girlfriends at the event, and we wanted to give you a peek inside. So, we brought our video camera along to capture some of the bustling, fun environment as girlfriends gab, drink, and shop. We also asked women “How Do Girlfriends Make Life Better?” We loved their answers and we think you will too! Watch the video above and let us know what you think! 

In addition to meeting up with some of our favorite galpals (and meeting one of our contest winners in person), we really liked the shopping opportunities at Shecky’s. Many local jewelry and fashion vendors were offering great discounts on hot fashions! They even have changing rooms right on the floor so you can try things on. We also enjoyed meeting food vendors like Frappe Vino and franchises such as Stella and Dot. While we did not have a chance to try the beer pairings, we did enjoy the drinks being poured by Skyy Vodka Infusion and the Pink Flirtinis featuring X-Rated Fusion Liqueur.

To finish the evening, we picked up our goodie bags! Here’s a photo of everything we took home. We’d definitely visit Shecky’s again. It’s a great place to meet up with girlfriends to toast your friendship, talk and shop! Check their website to see if they are coming to a city near you soon.

With swimsuit season staring us in the face, we’ve been thinking a lot about fitness. Getting in shape is definitely one of those things that is better with a girlfriend. It’s so much easier to stick to a fitness regime when you have a partner to check in with, to cheer you on, even to commiserate with you. So, we girlfriends-in-chief have embarked on another little fitness quest together. This time, we’re working on our tummies! Read on for the details, as well as a few more easy suggestions for getting fit with a girlfriend. And, we’d love to hear your suggestions, as well!

You may remember a while back we did the Mama Mio Bootcamp for Butts, with good results. Well, our girlfriends at Mama Mio came out with a Bootcamp for Tummies and we were two of the first lucky ladies to try it out! First of all, we simply adore Mama Mio products. They smell heavenly, they are loaded with high- quality ingredients, they are smartly packaged, they are labeled with good humor,  and most importantly, they work! For the Bootcamp products, Mama Mio has teamed up with exercise specialists to create targeted, efficient exercises that you can realistically do in just minutes a day. (For the tummies bootcamp, maternal fitness expert Julie Tupler developed the exercises.) The tummy exercises are easy to do, and you can literally do them sitting down (in the car, at your computer, anywhere!) The rest of the regime consists of two skincare products: Tummy Toner Skin Tightener and Get Waisted Body Shaper—each of them a great product on its own. If your tummy is puffy, crepey, and mom-like, you will see a difference from using these products. We’re into about the third week of our bootcamp, and we both are seeing our waists look more whittled, and the look and texture of our skin has definitely improved! One important lesson we’ve learned from using Mama Mio products is that by paying attention to a body part and treating it nicely, you actually start to feel better about it! And when you feel good about yourself, you look good!

So, here’s our point: Doing this bootcamp together is much more motivating than doing it alone. We can check in with each other and say “Did you do your exercises today?” or “How’s your tummy doing?” It’s fun to hear each other’s progress and share in each other’s successes. If you are “stuck” in your fitness regime, we challenge you to call up a girlfriend and get her to be your fitness partner. Just give it a try for 30 days and see how much better fitness can be with a girlfriend!

We’re all about easy, quick, ways to fitness, so here are a couple of our other fave ways to get fit with girlfriends:

Wii Fit Club: Invite your girlfriends over to work out on your Wii together. Using Wii Fit or the new EA Sports Active for Wii, you can create indivdual profiles and track your progress together. Do you workouts at home, then get together once a week for a check-in and group workout.

Walking Group: Maybe it’s from reading the new novel Wildwater Walking Club, but we’re newly inspired to walk! Walking and talking is seriously good for the soul. Take to the sidewalks, hiking trails, or woodland paths with your girlfriends at a regular time. Invest in a pedometer and pledge to reach 10,000 steps a day. 

Your turn: Do you exercise with girlfriends? We’d love to hear how that is “working out” for you. Give your fingers a workout and tell us in the comments!