Garden Club Christmas

My last and largest party of the season was my garden club Christmas auction today. With twelve more days until Christmas and my house fully decorated I feel like I need to plan at least one more party. I’m not sure what or when it will be, but some kind of open house, pop in, coffee, lunch, but something should take place to amortize all this decorating.  Plus Shay thinks every party is an opportunity for people to come visit her.  With three parties in eight days I hate to slow down Shay’s social life.
I love the Garden club party because I had the A team of co-hostesses. For as many years as I have hosted the party I have had Kay Peters help me out. She has done it so many times that she knows where everything is in my kitchen.  Carolyn Sloate is also an A team repeat who does not have to be told what to do, but just quietly goes about getting it done. New players this year were Theky Pappas and Mary Lloyd Prebble who I would do anything for since they continually do anything for me. Lastly Jean Bethea filled out our roster which was above and beyond since she was not required to host this year, but she just wanted to help.
Carolyn and I met before the party and made all the executive decisions about what to serve. Of course I had some ridiculous ideas for things that would have been way too labor intensive, like the year I made 60 individual strudels. Carolyn talked some sense into me and lobbied for a casserole. “Just give us a recipe and we can each make one.”  
Just giving people a recipe means I have to make a dish twice because I cook by throwing stuff in. Instead of making up something, then writing the recipe based on what I threw in and then making it again along with everyone else I just volunteered to make it all. I spent yesterday creating a chicken, mushroom and wild rice casserole. I think it turned out quite yummy so now I better write down exactly what I did because I will never remember.
The good thing about the A-team is they manned the kitchen while I did the auctioneering. We had a full house with lots of high bidding guests. Every pie and cake sold for crazy amounts of money. The Christmas decorations sold as if people did not have a wreath or tree already in their house. Even I bought two Christmas decorations despite not having a surface or wall without adornment already.
Lastly, we celebrated our Garden Club bee hive with the sale of the honey that came from our hive. The queen bee of our hive is named Doreen in honor of our wonderful member Doreen Yarbourough who passed away last year. Her sweet daughter Marjorie was a guest at the auction today and I teared up a bit when she won Karen Rabenaeu’s beautiful bee napkins in the auction.  
We raised a bunch of money, had a delicious lunch and visited with so many wonderful friends. When it was all over the A-team cleaned every inch of the kitchen and put away every fork and plate. I made them containers of leftover casserole and we were all happy that another Christmas auction went off so smoothly.