Em & Charles' Engagement Party

Congratulations again to Em and Charles. :)

Tonight was their engagement party, held at Em's parents' place. Em's brother and his wife (Wes and Dina) drove up from California. Charles' parents drove up from Oregon and his sister and her husband (Gab and Dan) live nearby. I made sure I flew back before today to make to the party or she'd have my head and it'd be ruled justifiable homicide. Dem and I drove down together but, unfortunately, we had to leave early because Dem had to work (overnight shift; gotta love the retail holiday season...) but we had so much fun. The two families mesh so well and there were a lot of jokes and laughter all around.

It'd been ages since I'd seen Wes, and it was the first time meeting Charles' family. It was also the first time I properly met Charles, which sounds quite bad considering he's been with my best friend for, what, four years now? Yeah... Well, he's been living in Oregon and Em's been in Las Vegas, plus I've been in and out of the country for the last couple of years.

It was really good to see Em and her parents, and have the three of us (Em, Dem and I) together again. There was a lot of food - turkey, mashed potato and gravy, cranberry sauce, a green bean casserole and a brocoli and cheese casserole, dinner rolls - and drinks - red & white wine, champagne, pop, iced tea - and, of course, dessert was apple pie, pumpkin pie and apple streusel pie with whipped cream and tea or coffee. What a feast. The table, settings, and party accents were all in the wedding's theme colours: black and Tiffany blue. (Some people also call it robin's egg blue.) The colours beautifully compliment each other and everything was done out very, very nicely.

We also had a few games. The first game: each person gets two (plastic) silver rings and there's a buzz word that we can't say. If you catch someone saying the buzz word, you take one of their rings. It was funny whenever someone slipped - I caught Gab and Dan once each - and Dina managed to lose one of her rings! The person with the most rings at the end of the night wins an awesome prize. The second game: the Newlyweds Game. Each person writes two questions for the couple on an index card, one asking Em something about Charles and vice versa. The couple have to try and have the same answer to each question; it doesn't matter if they don't know the right answer - they just have to say what they think the other person will say. The person the question is directed to writes the answer down and the other answers his/her answer out loud; if the answers are the same, the person the question was directed to gets the point. Or is it the other way around... Anyway, the guests also have to guess the percentage of answers that each spouse-to-be will get right and the person closest to the results wins a prize. The last game was Pictionary.