Down the Rabbit Hole
My calendar at Christmas expands beyond belief! For this I feel very lucky – but always incredible tired. Christmas seems to cover all sorts of events now - from early morning running in Santa hats to breakfast catch ups – from mince pie scoring to dinner celebrations and weekends away. Life has been awesomely fun in the lead up to Christmas and I wanted to share some of my Christmas festivities with you all.
One of the highlights of the Christmas period is always the works knees up! It is the time to let your hair down and have a few drinks and a dance with your work colleagues. As our team has grown over the years we were finding it increasingly difficult to find venues that could cater for us. We have around 20 people in our team now and most restaurants start to struggle with such numbers.
2016 therefore saw the year of change!!!!!!!
We needed to think outside the box and to our surprise a member of our team found an Alice in Wonderland Themed Party at a local venue known as Wherstead Park. We were a little wary as by signing up to the event it meant that our team would be joining a number of other companies to celebrate Christmas this year, but we thought a change could be good and went for it. My colleague was amazing at arranging it all and convinced pretty much everyone in the team to come along for a fun night out. I think having everyone engaged in the evening really helped make it enjoyable as everyone was so excited in the lead up – asking what each other were going to wear – planning taxis and where we were all going to get ready.
The event was also fantastic! I had one of the best Christmas work nights out in a long while – everything was super fun from the moment we got there. I hope the photos help to show the variety of things that kept us entertained throughout the night.
The Reception
After all getting ready at work and whizzing across to the venue we were instantly whisked into a reception area. This was the main foyer of the house. I was instantly impressed by how beautiful the venue was. The central staircase was stunning and sported a Christmas tree to bring in the festive feel. The Alice in Wonderland theme started immediately as we were greeted by rose bubbles with a label ‘drink me’ tied round it. We would have hated to break the rules so early on so naturally drank away while taking in our surroundings.
It will be of no surprise to those who know me well – but my excitement went through the roof when I then saw the characters all dressed up. I love fancy dress and I am a particular fan of dressing up as the Mad Hatter. I am sure you will agree from the photos the staff looked amazing dressed up. The costumes were perfect and they had gone all out on their makeup. We thought we would go and show them our support by generally being annoying and requesting a million pictures of all of them. There were also lots of other people dressed up as part of their work nights out – made me feel a little bit sad we didn’t get involved on the dressing up front – but there is always next year hey!
On reflection – and I don’t think I appreciated this at the time – but we actually meandered down the Rabbit hole as part of the event….
Meandering Down the Rabbit Hole
The main reception room led onto a corridor which took us to the main venue. This corridor was intended to be the section where Alice feel down the Rabbit Hole to Wonderland. The corridor was covered in wall art with all the most popular Alice “quotes”. I got very carried away and held everyone up having to take pictures of them all on the way through to dinner. I have posted a selection below. These really made you remember lots of parts of the story – like the Cheshire cate and the White Rabbit – really nice touch decoration wise.
Wonderland
The main hall was intended to be Wonderland and it looked amazing. The small corridor opened up into a big wide space with very tall ceilings. It felt like you were outside with three big trees and pompom decorations from the sky. In the background they also had a big screen where they were playing the most recent version of Alice in Wonderland.
Each company then had a big round table in this area and despite there being about 20 plus tables the venue felt very spacious and our party had lots of room. I think I was worried that we would lose a bit of team specialness by being at a function with lots of other people – but we had enough space it felt that we were all still together. This allowed us to still do a team Secret Santa and share out the silly hats without causing too much distraction to anyone else.
After sitting at our table for about five minutes I starter to look around further and was eager to go and explore. I fell in love with some of the décor that they had put in place. Under the trees I found flamingos and mallets to represent the croquet match with the Queen of Hearts.
We located a big Mad Hatter tea cake, some playing cards and a section for an afternoon tea. There was also a White Rabbit running around (although on later inspection we believe he may have just been part of another Christmas Party and not the actual event). A great deal of thought had gone into the decoration and it really did feel that we were in Wonderland.
'Eat Me’
Although slightly ‘wedding like’ we also had a treat on our table for each individual. This was a cute little box with the label ‘ eat me’. It contained a surprise brownie treat to eat. I thought this was a lovely addition to the theme– they really did think about all the little touches. We all appeared to have no will power though and we proceeded to eat our treats during the starter and main course stage of our meal. You would think we would know better by our ages!
‘The Food’
Prior to the evening we had all been asked to select from a menu - which had a great variety of choice. The food was brought out to us a table at a time. We had a few teething problems on who was having what food, but they had printed a spreadsheet to help us work this out.
Once organised we all tucked in and even with the number of people being catered for the food was delicious. For starters we had a lovely tomato + goats cheese salad, followed by Turkey roast dinner and finished with Christmas Pudding.
I picked the least elaborate dessert however and you will see from the photos below that the caterers had gone to extreme lengths to stick to the theme. The elaborate desserts were stunning and it seems a shame for everyone to tuck into them. However we did…. While all commenting on how long it must have taken them to create these.
‘ The Entertainment’
Christmas events have previously been very drunken affairs – mainly because that was the focus of the evening – dinner and then drinkies. This year however was slightly different – which was nice in many ways. The venue had put on so much entertainment it kept us busy having fun that we were not drawn in by the bar. It was a nice where I was so entertained I didn’t feel the need to get drunk. This was especially nice as I also ended up hangover free the following day. It was a credit to the venue that they created such a fun evening that drinking was not a critical element.
There were many different aspects to the entertainment. The first element however I was not so keen on. The venue had hired magicians to go round to each table and perform tricks. A magician you say… wow that is fun…. But for some reason I seem to have a big dislike for magic. I am not sure if it is the unknown I don’t like or just the fact that I feel as though I am being led, but I don’t like it at all. I don’t think I appreciated how much I didn’t like it until the magician tried to convince me I did. Apparently I am very passionate about my non-belief, but it added to the entertainment for the table as it made everyone laugh. I think I will always just be a non-believer!
After the main meal a dance floor was accessible for everyone to strut some stuff and show their best moves. There was also an option to play at the casino. We were each given some fake money to cash in and play. The winner at the end of the night with the most chips got a bottle of bubbles! Unfortunately we were unsuccessful and no prizes for us.
Always my favourite part of an evening is a photo booth! There were lots of props and opportunities to use the booth. This is one of many photos we had done over the course of the night. We were lucky enough to be given a free copy of each of the photos that were taken so we could have a good laugh at ourselves. I am not sure if we will be putting them up in the office yet though!
The evening whizzed by and I was disappointed to see midnight tick by and the event come to a close. I have only good things to say about this venue and the experience we had and have certainly been talking about it ever since. Would certainly consider going again in the future!!