Christmas Eve Dessert Bar!

I hope each and every one of you had a VERY Merry Christmas!!! It came - and it went. And for all of you who spent months and weeks and days planning - and stayed up until the wee hours of the morning on Christmas Eve to make Christmas Day "magic" happen for your little ones/your friends/your significant other, etc....high five!! We survived!! Ha!!

I will do a recap of our Christmas Day soon - but today I wanted to show pictures of the dessert bar that I did for our Christmas Eve service at church Saturday night. [Side note: I met a few of my blog readers at our Christmas Eve church service, and others who have visited prior - it's been so great meeting you and your families in person!!].

This dessert bar was fun to put together. I prepped almost everything at home so that I wouldn't bring too much of a mess to church with me. I headed to the church and started putting things in place at 3:30 p.m.; after unloading tablecloths, bags, boxes, apothecary jars, tables {can you see them in the background?} this is what the space looked like an hour later...

I packaged whoppers inside of individual treat bags...

Originally I was going to do all of the jars the same and tie a basic red bow around the tops. But then I decided to give them each a different look; I love how they turned out!

I was asked to do this fun "red & white" candy bar about two weeks before our Christmas Eve service. I knew I had to get to Hobby Lobby right away because I had a feeling that mostly all of their Christmas decor would would be raided with it being so close to Christmas - and as I thought, everything left was just remnants of what was once there in abundance. But I did spy, on the very bottom shelf, tucked way back behind some greenery, some sparkly leaf garland....

And these two peppermint decor elements. It's all that I needed to make this look happen!

Working with a moderate budget, I ended up going through my own Christmas decor bins and finding a lot of red and white elements that I could use.

Naturally I had to make some cookie "lollipops"!....

The plastic scoopers came from Party City. I tied some red and white stripped ribbon around them to fancy them up a bit : )

See the "Merry Christmas" on the white ribbon around the square vase above? Those are actually Christmas tags, re-purposed : )

Our dessert bar also had some hot chocolate treats. The dispensers and the hot chocolate packets aren't shown {nor is an additional jar full of peppermint bark!} as they were delivered after I took these photos.

The dessert bar was a wonderful idea and a big hit!! A warm welcome to our guests, and always a fun thing for the little kids - and big kids - to partake in ; )

Ilah has been enjoying her Christmas gifts and has loved playing with her BIG present - her play kitchen!! She got so many gifts for Christmas that she had to open the rest today {my mom practically bought out Toys-R-Us!}.

I was exhausted from being on my feet all day yesterday cooking Christmas Dinner - and then cleaning up. At the end of the night we rented "The Help" and fifteen minutes into it, I was asleep. Ilah is about to go down for a nap - I'm looking forward to finally seeing the movie that has gotten so many rave reviews!! Hope you all have a GREAT day!!