Christ Centered Easter Baskets

My amazing sister who blogs about Family Home Evening ideas over at Family Home Evening Lessons just posted this awesome Christ Centered Easter Basket today and I wanted to share it with my readers, especially due to the great response I had to me Christ Centered Easter Idea Roundup last week.  She has great ideas and FREE printables to go along with them!  Head on over to her blog for all the details.  I am going to get started on my baskets first thing next week.  Well, I’ve got some things already but need to get all the treats and eggs ready still!  So much to do, so little time!!

Click the picture to be taken to the post. Enjoy!

RELIEF SOCIETY BIRTHDAY PARTY {Super Service Soiree}

Last year I was in charge of our Relief Society Birthday Party.  For those who don’t know, The Relief Society is the largest women’s organization in the world.  It is the women’s organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons, of which I am a member.  Every year, we celebrate the organization of the Relief Society with some type of activity/meeting for the women in our ward.  A ward is how our church members are organized into congregations based on geographical locations.

Anyway, I know a lot of ladies are searching the web right about now for ideas for what to do for their activity this year so I wanted to share what we did last year because it was a big success.

Our theme for the night was:

“SOUP”ER SERVICE SOIREE

“Buzz”ily Doing Something Extraordinary

I based that off what Emma Smith said to the sisters at the very first Relief Society meeting…that they would be doing “something extraordinary”.

Here is our invitation made by a friend of mine who is also a fabulous photographer. You can find her on Facebook HERE!

So, we had a Bee theme for the main food table, which I did.  I made these cute as heck cupcake toppers that I was in LOVE with and put them on cupcakes topped with a beehive of frosting.  For those who don’t know, the beehive is a symbol of our church standing for hard work and industry.  We had several soups and a delicious salad.  We used beehive water dispensers.

You can download these toppers for FREE by clicking the button below. In exchange you just need to share it on Facebook or Twitter for me

Hands of Heaven

***A BIG thank you to all who commented on my last post.  You made me feel happy!***

Well, I’ve got sick kids and I am sick, too, so I figured this would be a good time to get some blogging done.

I’ve got half my Christmas shopping done and I’ve got all my decorating done AND my house isn’t even a total wreck so I am feeling pretty on top of things right now.  I am really unhappy that I am sick.  I HATE being sick!  But, such is life, I guess.

In my church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) we have a women’s organization called the Relief Society.  Once a month we have an activity on a week night, and currently I am in charge of organizing these activities.  A couple months ago I put on my first activity.  I wanted to make it really nice and special.  It was a night about bringing us all together as sisters even more than we already are.

The jumping off point for the evening was a video I had seen a couple years back called Hands of Heaven.  Here is a clip from it.  It is incredibly touching and I LOVE the message.  I highly recommend it.  You can order it online from one of our church bookstores called Deseret Book.

Anyway, here is what we did.  As the sisters entered, we tied together their hands in pairs.  We told them they had to stay tied together until we told them they could untie.  We thought this would be a fun way to help people who didn’t know each other well or weren’t currently close friends get to know each other better.  We gave them a list of prompting questions to help them find things to talk about.  I was worried about this activity but it really turned out great. 

We then had an opening prayer and song.  We sang “Lord, I Would Follow Thee” but we changed the word “brother’s” to “sister’s”.  We then invited the sisters to serve themselves dinner from our buffet.  But we told them they had to stay tied together until they were seated and ready to eat.  This was fun to watch.  It took some creative serving and teamwork.

The sisters then ate their dinner.  We served Fruited Pasta Chicken Salad, Antipasto sticks and crackers, rolls, cucumber water, and strawberry water.  They all had a cupcake at their seat for dessert.  They were White Chocolate Orange cupcakes and they were divine!  I will post the recipe in another post.

After dinner we showed the video.  There were few dry eyes in the room.  I then gave a short talk about how we all have trials and we all need friends and support.  I then shared a personal experience about when my Relief Society sisters had pulled me in and helped me through a difficult time in my life.  We then had two other sisters share experiences of a similar type.  We ended with a special musical number and a prayer. 

It was an amazing night and I think the sisters all felt love and friendship.

The decorations were AMAZING!  My pictures do not do it justice.  It looked like a wedding reception.  The decorations were super simple but packed a lot of punch.  Under each plate is a piece of scrapbook paper.  Then we had all the mercury glass candlesticks with the tissue pom poms.  One of the ladies on my committee had those little silver balls which we scattered all over the tables.  It just looked elegant.