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These kids of mine are beyond excited that it is almost winter. It makes it easy for me to get excited about it too. I love the snow, it’s so beautiful and as long as I don’t have to drive in it when it really storms, I don’t mind winter. Good thing since I live in Minnesota and we get plenty of snow here. Surprisingly, we don’t have any snow yet and it was actually almost 70 last week. That isn’t stopping me from kicking off our winter celebrations though.

In a few weeks, we will be hosting our third annual cookie bake day. All of our friends and their kids come over to bake cookies. Since I love to entertain, I knew I would have to do something fun, wintery and beautiful to set up for the party. The ideas kept rolling around in my head and it started to come together nicely. I know people think blues and whites when they think winter, but I wanted something different. I wanted reds, whites and silvers.

I wanted the decorating to be easy things that wouldn’t take a ton of time for me to make. I started with a white tablecloth. I laid out some leftover batting I had from a project on top of the table. Using white tape, I hung some red ornaments along the front of the table. I filled a couple of vases with some red and silver ornaments and set them up on some raised blocks. I had picked up the letters SNOW to decorate. I haven’t used glitter much lately but I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

Using Mod Podge I covered the letters and then sprinkled a heavy layer of silver glitter over them. I highly recommend doing this in a tray of some sort to cut down on the mess. I let that dry and repeated with another layer of Mod Podge and more glitter. I did each letter 3 or 4 times until it was covered as much as I wanted it to be. I love how they turned out and after the party, these will be part of our decorations through the winter. Once I set them on the table in front of the vases, I pretty much just sat there staring at them for awhile. It’s so beautiful, don’t you think?

The other decoration I wanted were some easy tissue paper snowflakes that took me only a couple minutes each. Taking two sheets of square tissue paper, fold them in half and cut along that fold. Then fold them in half again, making a square, and cut along that fold. Fold it all up accordion like. Tie around the center with a thin ribbon, leave enough ribbon to tie it to whatever you want to hang it on. Cut a triangle at each end. Spread each layer of the accordion out to make your ornaments as poofy as you want them. If you want a little extra on these, you can add some glitter to make them a little fancier.

Next up was a take home party favor for our guests. Since we are having a cookie bake, wouldn’t it be fun for everybody to leave with their own personalized Santa’s Cookie plate and a Santa’s Milk mug? I’ve always wanted to make some so this was the perfect reason to finally do it. You can find out how to make them at the end of the page. For our cookie, we decided to keep it simple this year. We made some Pillsbury™ Funfetti® Sugar Cookie Mix to make them into cookies and they were nice and soft. I added in some of the M&M’s® White Peppermint and, well, it took all of my self control not to eat them all.

I also had some leftover plastic candy cane holders from last year that I knew would come in handy at some point. I thought I could fill them with some red and white candy, tie them with a bow and add a little gift tag. I bet you want to know what candy I used, right?! Well, M&M’s® has some seasonal flavors out. I’m not always one for trying new flavors, but every so often I just have to. The M&M’s® White Peppermint sounded perfect. They are – and they taste even better. It’s entirely possible that I have already polished off an entire bag by myself. I really didn’t think I would like them but they are so yummy! I will be sending everybody home with their personalized Santa plate, Santa’s Milk mug and candy cane.

I had this adorable red tray and I had an awesome project planned for it but it wasn’t working out. Oh well, it still was perfect for serving our next treat. Since I was thinking snow and hot chocolate and since I had also discovered this other little delicious treat – M&M’s® Hot Chocolate, I thought I’d make some completely edible hot chocolate cups. I had picked up some candy mold shot glasses on clearance after Halloween and was just waiting for the right opportunity to use them and here it was!

I melted some chocolate with a little bit of Great Value Milk and filled the molds. Why Great Value milk, you ask? Because they are doing awesome things this year. Did you know that one of the most requested items at food banks is milk? Yet, food banks are only able to provide an average of one gallon of milk per person per year. By purchasing 2 bags of M&M’s® at Walmart (9.4 oz bags or larger), a gallon of milk will be donated to the food banks. You get to make your mouth all sorts of happy and do something awesome for others in need as part of the Great American Milk Drive. In case you aren’t already leaving to drive to the store and try out the new flavors, you can get this coupon for $1.00 off of 2 bags M&M’s®. If you don’t want to buy candy, you can still donate milk to help a person in need this holiday season.

They freeze really fast. I made some with dark chocolate and some with white chocolate. The white chocolate ones I added crushed up M&M’s® White Peppermint to. It added a nice bit of color and the peppermint white chocolate flavor will leave you drooling. After they were all frozen, I removed them from the molds. Hopefully you will have one mold that doesn’t fill all of the way so you have to eat it right away {I did that with one where I didn’t push the crushed candy down far enough}.

We took a few of the cookies we had made and crushed them up into small pieces. We filled each of our shot glass mugs with some Pillsbury™ Funfetti® Holiday Cake Mix that we broke into pieces. Then we filled the rest of the cups with either M&M’s® Hot Chocolate or M&M’s® White Peppermint. We topped them off with mini marshmallows to give it an authentic hot chocolate look. These turned out so fun and festive and I know will be a huge hit!

Because I am a self proclaimed M&M’s® addict, I also picked up some M&M’s® Holiday Milk Chocolate, M&M’s® Holiday Peanut, and my personal favorite – M&M’s® Holiday Peanut Butter {again, I eat a whole bag at once, I dare you to stop before you eat them all} and put them in small mason jars tired with a silver bow.

You can enter the #BakeInTheFun Sweepstakes now for a delicious chance to win some goodies.

Holiday #BakeInTheFun

The last thing I had to set up was our hot chocolate bar. I whipped up a few batches of hot cocoa {seriously easy, it only takes about 10 minutes} and threw it in the crock pot. I had picked up these glass containers that are just so stinking cute. I ordered some small wooden scoops and tied a silver bow on each one. I used a variety of different hot chocolate toppings – white chocolate chips, chocolate chips, coconut, mint candy pieces, cherries, caramel sauce, crushed up cookies, mini marshmallows, M&M’s® White Peppermint and M&M’s® Hot Chocolate. I also had a jar of cinnamon sticks for added flavor or just for stirring. Everybody could customize their own hot chocolate for a delicious afternoon drink. I had picked up some cute milk bottles awhile back and thought they would be perfect for our hot chocolate. Since I had a lot of different toppings, I flipped some little dip cups over and sat a serving tray on top to set hot chocolate toppings on.

That’s our party setup. Now that I know I love it, I can’t wait to recreate it for our cookie bake in a few weeks. I promised you I would show you how to make your own Santa plate and mug, so here it is.

Personalized Santa Plate and Mug Directions

Vinyl stickers with the words on it. You can cut it out by hand, order it from somewhere, or if you have a cutting system, it’s easy to make yourself. Here’s my handy tip – don’t pick this font, ha! It’s a tough one to work with but I just love it so I stuck with it.

Once you have it cut down, peel the excess vinyl away, leaving only the letters. {If you want to instead use permanent marker, do this the opposite way leaving blank spaces where the letters are. Color in the spaces once it is on the plate and heat to make it permanent}.

Apply transfer tape, contact paper or whatever you choose over the letters. Be sure to press down firmly across all of the letters. Then peel up the transfer paper and the letters should now be stuck to it.

Arrange the letters on the plate and mug the way you want them. I found it easy to work with smaller pieces so I cut it up into words and applied them separately. Press firmly down onto the plate ensuring that all of the letters stick to the plate. Then carefully peel up the transfer tape, if letters start to pull up, press down firmly again. Repeat on the mug.

Tada! Your own personalized Santa plate and mug.