Christmas Family Night

We decided that we needed to start doing more family events in our ministry. This is our first official family night and we thought the best time to kick it off was during the Christmas season. People love Christmas events, and it’s easy to put together a night that will be fun for the entire family. I have seen family nights be successful in some churches, and not so successful in others. I wasn’t sure what to expect, so we did require families to register online before the event. This helps a ton with planning. If you don’t know who will be coming, you will end up either over buying or under buying, and neither of those is a good thing. We charged our families a flat fee of $10 per family to make it affordable for families of all sizes and raised the price to $15 for late registrations. Everyone seemed to think it was a fair price and we had a great turnout for our event.

Theme/Photo Booth

We went with the ugly Christmas sweater theme for the night, and it was a hit! We decided to create a photo booth for the event because of course, you want to capture lots of pictures of all those horrendous outfits. However, we really wanted to create an above average photo booth that would make the families really want to go for it! I think we definitely accomplished that. We found this tutorial on Pinterest, and tweaked it a bit to fit our materials. We had some large 4×8 ft pieces of insulation foam board, so we used that instead of the plywood they used in their tutorial. It makes it lighter for transportation and bigger. We bought two large ugly frames from thrift stores for the frames, and took out the pictures and glass which makes them much lighter weight for the project. Before attaching the frames, I traced them on the foam board where I wanted them and cut the holes for the frames with a large x-acto knife. It doesn’t need to be a perfect cut because you are going to cover it up. Once you have the holes for your frames, you may want to reinforce the sides if they are too thin. I used some gorilla tape to make the sides more sturdy, and it worked great. Next, cover the entire front of your foam board with wrapping paper. You can wrap the edges like a present and tape them to the back of the board. You can choose any wrapping paper you want, but I do suggest using heavy duty wrapping paper. If you buy the cheap stuff, it may tear before it makes it to your event. When you have it all wrapped, cut the frames out using an x-acto knife. Leave some edges to wrap over the sides, and tape to the back to cover up the inside of the foam. The hard part is over at this point. We attached the frames to the front of the paper using hot glue, and it held together really well.

You can get creative with the rest of the front of your photo booth. We bought three large stockings of varying sizes from thrift stores and hung them on the front using command hooks. We went the extra mile with our garland at the top. We made our own ugly sweater garland using cheap garland from the Dollar Tree. We made tiny red and green sweaters out of craft felt, and hot glued embellishments on the front like Christmas foam stickers, pom poms, bells, and pipe cleaners. We bought all of the embellishments at Dollar Tree. We made ten strands of ugly sweater garland, and used it for the photo booth, photo booth props, and around the room for decor. Once you have finished decorating your photo booth, you will need to make a stand. We had some 2x4s that were already attached to wood bases that we hot glued to the back of our photo booth. We also had someone help us screw a piece of flat plywood to the wood bases to create a stand. This helped some of our smaller kids become tall enough to stick their heads through the frames. Photo booth props were easy for this theme. We purchased some adorable ugly sweater photo booth props from Oriental Trading as well as this giant cardboard ugly sweater for anyone who “forgot” to come in their ugly sweater. We also had a strand of our homemade ugly Christmas sweater garland, santa hats, and Christmas headbands (purchased at Dollar Tree) available for families to use in their pictures. The photo booth was a huge success. Everyone loved it, and best of all, it didn’t fall apart!
We kept the table decorations simple. We bought gold and green garland-covered trees from the Dollar Tree for the centerpieces, and we hot glued foam bowls to the bottom of some of them to make them appear taller for depth. We purchased these ugly sweater stickers from Oriental Trading and when we received them in the mail they were huge! We cut the sweaters and the cute little signs out with scissors and used them as confetti on our tables around the trees.

 

Ugly Sweater Contest

We had a lot of fun with the ugly Christmas sweater contest. Our families really went all out for this event. I don’t think there was one person who didn’t wear an ugly sweater of some kind. We saw everything from Donald Trump on a sweater to a lady who attached a large smartphone to her sweater with a digital fireplace on the screen. We set up a voting table where everyone could go and vote for their favorite person or family. We printed these free printable voting cards for people to fill out and this sign for the table. To make the table extra special, we bought an ugly sweater from the thrift store and covered the voting box with the sweater leaving the neck opening as the place to put your votes in the box. We added a large bow for a final touch.
We had several categories of ugly sweater awards to give out. We purchased these hilarious ugly sweater trophies from Oriental Trading to give to the winners.  They come with stickers you can put on them with different categories to choose from. They have already discontinued them on their website, but you could used these trophies instead, and it would be just us funny. We also purchased some sweater ornaments we found at Walgreens for each of the winners to take home and put on their tree, or re-gift at their next Christmas party. We allowed people to vote most of the night, and tallied the votes up at the end of the night. Our award ceremony was the grand finale of the night. We gave awards for Ugliest Sweater, Ugly, but Classy, Creative, DIY, and a Family award.

Food/Hot Cocoa Bar

We prepared lots of yummy treats and snacks for our families to munch on during the event. We set up
three 8 ft tables in a row in the center of the room for our food and hot cocoa bar. You could serve yourself from either side of the tables. We found some cute disposable tablecloths at Dollar Tree in the Christmas section that actually had hot cocoa cups all over them. They were perfect, and after the event was over we could just throw them away. The food table included cracker trays, cheese trays, and homemade chex mix for non-sweet options. We used mini metal cookie cutters in Christmas shapes to cut slices of cheese for the cheese platter. It took about ten minutes to cut the cheese into shapes and it made the cheese look so cute. We made four batches of the Chex Mix, and ended up having a lot left over. People were definitely there for the cookies! I made several different types of homemade cookies and placed them on platters we purchased from the Dollar Tree. I made sure to avoid nuts in all of the food, and made a couple cookie recipes that were egg-free because I knew a couple kids had egg allergies. My favorite cookies were the ugly Christmas sweater cookies I made and decorated. I purchased an ugly Christmas sweater cookie kit from Big Lots for $5, and used the cookie cutter and the sprinkles inside the kit. I needed to make a lot more than 12 cookies, so I used my favorite sugar cookie recipe and made my own icing. The cookies turned out super cute, and they were all gone at the end of the night.

For the hot cocoa bar, we had a lot of fun collecting ugly Christmas mugs from people at the church, thrift stores, and the Dollar Tree. We wanted everyone to have a real Christmas mug to drink their hot cocoa from. It was a bit of an investment for us to make this year, but we have already used them for three more Christmas events this year at the church, and we will use them again next year. It was a lot of fun for everyone to be able to pick out their own unique Christmas mug. At the hot cocoa bar we provided hot water and cocoa mix as well as lots of yummy mix-ins. We provided caramel sauce, mini and regular marshmallows, peppermints, caramels, and several varieties of chocolate chips. We purchased Christmas buckets from the dollar section at Target for all of the mix-ins.

Activities/Games

We kept all of the activities and games casual and flexible to encourage families interacting with each other and other families. We set up a game table at the front of the room with Christmas board and card games, some regular board games, and some ugly sweater coloring sheets. Families could use the games and coloring sheets at any time during the event. We found some a Christmas version of monopoly at Walgreens for only $15 as well as a couple other Christmas games and an ugly Christmas sweater card game on Amazon. It was so fun to see families playing the games together at their tables, and groups of kids around the room playing board games on the floor together.

We had planned to have a specific time in the night where we would have each of the families decorate their own gingerbread house, but we ended up having more families sign up than we expected. We decided to only have one gingerbread house per table, and kept it really casual. It seemed to work out well in the end. We made the base houses for the families so all they had to do was decorate them. It was a bit out of our budget to buy the kits, so we put something together ourselves. We bought a couple family size boxes of graham crackers, and put the houses together ourselves. I bought shallow tin pans from the Dollar Tree to attach each house to for decorating. I found an awesome hack online
where you put the base house together using hot glue instead of icing. You can’t eat the house at the end, but who does that anyways? It was still quite frustrating at first to keep the graham crackers from breaking, but I got better at cutting them and assembling them with time. I have a couple of tips for anyone attempting to do this for a large crowd. Make sure you recruit a few helpers and possibly allow a couple of days before the event for making them. Buy extra graham crackers because there will be quite a few broken ones in the box, and you will break a lot at the beginning. I thought they turned out pretty nice in the end, but would never do it again by myself on the day of the event. We made candy trays for each of the tables using segmented containers we purchased at the Dollar Tree. We also purchased most of our candy at the Dollar Tree.

Family Feud

The big event of the night was our game of Family Feud on the big stage. We tried to make it as close to the real show as possible while also getting a lot of the families involved. We didn’t have a good buzzer option so we adapted that part of the game a bit. We brought one person from each family up to the front, gave the question, and each of them had one of these giant dice to roll. Whoever rolled the highest on their dice got a chance to answer first. If they guessed the top answer on the board they got to choose if their family would pass or play. If they did not guess the top answer it went to the other person. We played knock out rounds where whichever family won the round got to play again against another family. At the end of five rounds, we awarded the winning family with a Starbucks gift card for the parents and a Christmas monopoly game for the whole family. We used these awesome Christmas questions and results provided by Bryan Phelps. Our families were so excited for the game, and were begging to play. We will definitely bring this game back at future family events.

We created a Family Feud presentation in ProPresenter. You’ll need to understand how props work in ProPresenter in order to use this. There is currently no way to export or export Props in ProPresenter, so you’ll have to create your own. If you import the presentation we used, you’ll see we have the game board for each question along with the correct number of answers available for selection. My husband, Sean created the game board and the materials he used are available here. He also created a video tutorial explaining how he used props and what he did to get the desired effect.

Here is a link to purchase a template for creating your own family feud game if you aren’t techy enough to figure out what Sean is talking about.

Are you planning any awesome family events for your ministry in 2017? I would love to hear how you are effectively reaching the families in your church.