Christmas Staff Party

Saturday night was our Christmas Staff Party. It went great! We had a good turn out, and it's neat because we have some staff that drove 3 1/2 hours to have dinner with us!
We went to Romies for dinner, which is a small restaurant that serves gourmet southern cooking. It has awesome food! When we go there for dinner, our favorite - and I mean favorite entree is their ribs. It is a special, they don't have them as a staple on the menu. The menu (notice I'm starting with food first!):
Ribeye with garlic mashed potatoes and green bean bundles
or
Shrimp and grits.
They served a broth over the shrimp and grits, which is the first time I've had that before. It is different enough that I had a hard time comparing it to Harvey's new menu item of shrimp and grits with andouille sausage. My goal was to see which was better, but they were just too different for me to pick. The ribeye was great, too. It was one of those nights where I was so disappointed when I was full, the time to stop eating came too quickly. Before the meal we ordered artichoke dip and crab dip, which were both tasty as well.
OK, back to the party. Mark and I got there early and invited the staff to meet us at the bar early for drinks, and a few staff came. It was a nice, intimate time of conversation before we moved to the table which was too large to talk to everyone. Every year we joke about playing musical chairs halfway through dinner. Next year I might very well do a Chinese fire drill!
Dessert and awards were at our house after the meal. I had planned on having a dessert bar with brownies and pound cake and toppings. The toppings were homemade chocolate syrup, caramel sauce (Smuckers), Cool Whip and homemade whipped cream, pineapple topping, cherry pie filling, almonds, vanilla bean ice cream, and a cherry for the top. I envisioned creativity and lots of people smothering their desserts making killer brownies that would make TGI Fridays envious. So I was disappointed when I saw brownie after plain brownie. Oh well, everything else went great.

Awards ceremony - as many of you know, we had virtually a complete staff turnover this summer. All of our staff were different at this Christmas party. So, no one knew we gave awards to everyone. We could, at this point, make up traditions and no one would know any different! This year we threw in a huge bonus for the salesperson of the year. I won't bore you with the other categories. They all focused on sales and club culture. That was my favorite part of the night. Susan (our partner) and Mark and I have already thought of a few fun things to add next year.