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Christmas Make It & Take It events, holiday tea parties, and progressive dinner parties are all popular events for the Christmas and holiday times. Be sure to take pictures as your women’s ministry hosts an event for your women to enjoy amazing food, fun, and fellowship!
3 Reasons These Events Work For Smaller Churches:
- Each event can be successful with 2 or 20 in attendance.
- Each can be amazing with a small budget or a large one.
- Each focuses on relationships first (which is what Jesus did!).
Make It & Take It Events
Gifts In A Jar
This can be an easy low-cost event. Enjoy an evening making gifts or mixes in a jar to take home or use as gifts for others. Find mason jars for low-cost at resale stores if you or your friends don’t have extra jars at home. Many recipes can be adjusted to make in jelly jars or pint jars for smaller gifts or serving sizes.
The possibilities are endless for creating gifts in a jar. Food gifts include mixes for cookies, soups, hot chocolate, trail mix, spice blends, or even pancake mixes. If you are thinking about non-food gift ideas, try bath salts, candles, or mason jar oil lamps with round floating wicks. This book gives 100 Easy Recipes in Jars for more ideas.
Looking for a step-by-step guide to starting or restarting your women’s ministry?
Check out the Women’s Ministry Bundle For Small Churches!
Christmas Craft Night
Host an evening doing one big project or two+ smaller projects. Try making Christmas wreaths, snowflakes from clothes hangers, or cardmaking.
For smaller projects, think about Christmas ornaments, homemade candles, making lanterns, or sewing holiday pot holders. 12 Budget-Friendly Craft Night Ideas give some great ideas. If you have the budget, include giveaways of craft materials or gift cards to the local craft store.
Cookie Decorating Party
Decorating cookies together is a classic Make It & Take It event. This event gives a great opportunity for fun, fellowship, and building connections with each other. Check with a local bakery to purchase undecorated round sugar cookies, gingersnaps, and vanilla wafers. If you have time, make them yourself.
Ask guests to bring supplies to decorate the sugar cookies: frosting, icing, edible food coloring markers, colored sugar, and baking sprinkles. Provide white chocolate wafers, chocolate wafers, and Crisco to add to the melting chocolates.
Drizzle thin stripes of chocolate onto the vanilla wafer cookies. Dip gingersnaps halfway in white chocolate. Line holiday shirt boxes with wax paper for your participants to take their cookies home.
Check out Event #3 Cookie Creation Stations for a family-style event.
Charcuterie, Christmas Tea, And More!
Fun & Easy Charcuterie Party
“Charcuterie” doesn’t have to be expensive! Instead of crossing this idea off because your budget is small, ask everyone to bring an item for your charcuterie table.
Provide serving trays or cutting boards, or even brown butcher paper on a table for the “board.” As women bring their items, ask them to put them on the board. The following person adds to the design as they add their items. Use toothpick flags to identify different flavors of your cheese cubes. Use the food and charcuterie theme to plan the devotion, decorations, games, and party favors.
Choose from the following themes for your Charcuterie Party:
- Unity: Your group worked together to build the charcuterie. If you hadn’t worked together, you would have a table with separate piles of food spaced throughout the room.
- Gifts & Talents: Everyone has gifts, talents, and different things to offer in their service to the church and the Lord. Discuss how beautiful and full the charcuterie is with the things everyone brought to the table.
- We Need You: In one or more places, place an inverted bowl on your board so nobody can fill that space. After everyone has arrived and before your devotion and food are served, remove the bowl to show the empty space. For your speaking or devotion, follow through with the theme that everyone is needed. Mention the charcuterie board is incomplete and missing something. This same principle applies to the Body of Christ. We need each other to fully be complete and walk in the fullness of God’s plan for His church.
Host A Dessert Affair To Remember
This event is designed to show off your fancy desserts. Many people love sharing their favorite holiday recipes, so ask for volunteers to make and bring a dessert to share.
Fill the evening with dessert and food trivia, and the Commonalities icebreaker #11 found here >> Your Favorite Icebreaker Games For Small Churches. If your budget allows, give out prizes or party favors like tree tealight candles or mini Christmas ornaments. Remember to take lots of pictures!
If you like dessert-themed events, check out Small Church Cookie Events For Any Season.
Christmas Gala
No church is too small for a gala! Having individual table hosts makes it perfect, as you can have 2 tables or 20.
Table hosts for this event bring the table settings and decorations for their tables that will seat friends or guests. Fill this event with a nice buffet style, serve yourself dinner, elegant or festive desserts, butter mints, a guest speaker, singing Christmas carols, and door prizes. Offer inexpensive party favors for your guests to take home.
A Few Of My Favorite Things Brunch
Weave the theme, ”My Favorite Things”, throughout every aspect of your brunch. Share a devotion based on favorite Bible verses or a favorite part of Christmas: the birth of Jesus, Christ’s love, etc. Share favorite holiday traditions for the icebreaker.
Plan to have an ornament exchange where ladies purchase or home-make an ornament based on a favorite thing.
Pass out a sheet of paper with fill-in-the-blank spaces for favorite things such as Christmas tradition, Christmas carol, season, breakfast item, flower, fruit, Christmas memory, winter activity for fun, ice cream topping, book, hobby, kitchen utensil, etc. After party-goers fill in the blanks, read the questions to the group, and shout out their answers.
Serve favorite foods. Include a DIY drink or dessert. A hot chocolate bar is a fun option. Guests choose their favorite hot chocolate add-ins. Decorate sugar cookies and let partygoers decorate with their favorite frostings and sprinkles for their cookies. Send cookies home in Christmas foil containers with lids.
Progressive Dinner
For another idea that doesn’t break your women’s ministry budget, plan a progressive dinner with your group to eat different parts of the meal in different homes. Women either host on their own, a course at their home, or two can host together at one house. Divide up the meal courses based on the homes that will host.
A 3-course meal would include:
- Appetizer
- Main course
- Dessert
Add any of the following courses if you have more than three homes hosting: hors d’oeuvre, soup, appetizer, salad, first main course, palate cleanser, second main course, cheese course, and dessert. To keep the momentum and fun going, leave as soon as you finish eating the course and carpool between the homes.
Try the Travelling Christmas Platter Event for another progressive type of event!
Festive Christmas Party
Don’t stress thinking you have to do something ultra-creative or expensive, because everyone loves a holiday party! Decorate with traditional Christmas reds and greens or anything easy to find in your own personal stash of unused holiday decorations.
Start the evening with get-to-know-you mixers. Plan a devotional around the reason for the season. Include lots of party games with prizes like holiday bingo or Christmas song trivia. Ask everyone to bring an appetizer, snack, or plate of Christmas cookies. Finish out the evening with a round of singing your favorite Christmas carols.
This blog post gives great insight for personally inviting guests to attend your events: Why Personal Invitations Work Better Than Bulletin Announcements.
Christmas Tea & More
Make your decor unique by making the most of local offerings when decorating for your Christmas Tea: boxwood in the south, red twig dogwood and winterberries in the north and parts of Canada, winter jasmine in the west, spruce or fir in Poland, and eucalyptus and rosemary in Australia.
Traditional tea parties serve hot tea. Having refreshments beyond traditional tea may encourage more women to join the event. This Christmas, add a twist and offer different tea beverages like sweet tea, iced chai tea, or chocolate chai tea. Offering a non-tea option such as hot chocolate or coffee may entice a non-tea drinker to join in the fun.
Think of how to give the cozy feeling of Christmas as you plan your sandwiches, scones, cakes, or other menu items. Be conscious of anyone with food sensitivities when planning the menu. Consider having gluten-free, nut free, and/or dairy-free options.
Check out this post for tea party ideas: How To Host A Women’s Tea Party.
Looking for a step-by-step guide to starting or restarting your women’s ministry?
Check out the Women’s Ministry Bundle For Small Churches!
Imitating Jesus Always Leads To Relational Ministry
We’ve most likely all heard the phrase, “Jesus is the reason for the season.” One thing Jesus did best was being relational. In fact, His entire ministry was relational! He called the disciples to quit their jobs and hang out with Him. Jesus called out to Zacchaeus and wanted to visit with him at his house –– the house of a tax collector. When He went to the well, He took time to talk with the Samaritan woman.
Follow the example of Jesus! These events have one thing in common: They are about spending time with one another, building relationships, sharing moments, and having fun with each other.
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