Weekend Wrap-Up ~ Christmas Party Food Recipes

 Here is hoping this Monday brings you joy in the midst of the hard and good spaces this Christmas week.  

I am hoping the week feels a little lighter and your college kids are home and others are on a well deserved break.  Let's pray we can all continue as the new normal even after this holiday season.   

Our Friday was busy with my oldest getting out her widsome teeth.  She was quite sore and even so last night, but hopefully each day will be a little better.  She has had some sweet friends come hang out and visit her, so it has been nice to have company in the house.  

I spent the weekend cooking and preparing for 2 couples who work with us at my husband's business as we did our Christmas celebration Saturday night.  I have 2 big boxes of inventory in our dining room, so I got creative and just wrapped them like big packages!  Here are some pictures of our food and recipes with each.  Everything turned out so good and we will be eating on this goodness all week!

You can see here the two boxes in the corner of our dining room.

And here they are wrapped as Christmas gifts!

Ready for our guests!

Here is our food table.  I love the appetizer type menu!

Pictured above, I had a shrimp tray with cocktail sauce, which I purchased at my local grocery store.  Above that, are mini crab cakes, which I purchased at Costco.  I just had to bake these in the oven.  It was nice to have two prepared dishes!

I then grilled some chicken tenders, which I had marinated and then cooked in my air fryer.  I also then made a BBQ sausage/cheese tray and a bacon cheese dip.  For the sausage tray, I use turkey sausage and sugar free BBQ sauce.  I grill the sausage with BBQ seasoning and a BBQ sauce on top.  Then I sliced it, cut up cheese and sprinkled BBQ seasoning on top of it all.  I served it and the dip with Ritz crackers and also had a bowl of Pita chips & hummus. 

Next to the Pita chips, I had a veggie tray with peppers, carrots, broccoli, and tomatoes.  On the cake stand, I had a platter of cranberry bruschetta.  This was a such a sweet, good flavor on a loaf of baguette bread I purchased at Trader Joe's.  I made the cranberry relish on Friday night and assembled the bread on Saturday afternoon.

Next to the veggies and bread, I made sausage balls with cream cheese.  The cream cheese adds such a good flavor!  I assembled the sausage balls Friday night and put them in the freezer to bake on Saturday.  For the sausage, I used a mixture of deer sausage and turkey sausage to make it a little healthier.  My favorite brand of turkey sausage is Jennie O. Next to the sausage balls, I had a container of pretzel sticks, covered in chocolate and drizzeld with caramel.  I purchased these from Aldi.

In addition to the pretzel sticks, I made mini key lime pies and scattered some Christmas Rolo's on the platter.  I also made Red Velvet crinkle cookies, which were featured in this month's edition of Southern Living.  I made the key lime pies and cookies also on Friday night.  

We made our Colombian hot chocolate for our guests & they brought other drinks to share.

We ate in our den, to keep things casual, but I did have some simple flowers and a table runner on our breakfast table. 

Sunday afternoon, it was fun as a family to eat leftovers and then we watched the movie Daddy's Home 2.  This is such a funny movie and is also a Christmas movie!  I also watched a few other random Christmas shows from the past.  One being the Christmas episode of Brady Bunch, Rudolph and then I found a Love Boat Christmas show so I recorded that.

I appreciate each of you reading and truly wish you a Merry Christmas with your loved ones this week. I will be back next week to blog again. 

Linking up with Heather.