Beanbag toss

We found a jack-o-lantern beanbag toss board in the church closet. 

It's been in the church closet for years. No one knows who made it. No one knows which ward it belongs to. It's simply perpetually there.

So we took it home with us and multi-purposed that thing!

The reverse, you see, was blank:

We puzzled about how we might turn it into something Christmassy, but the only thing I could really settle on was a tree because it felt blasphemous to chuck beanbags at anything else (for example, an angel came to mind—with the triangle eyes becoming the wings—but we really couldn't encourage kids to chuck beanbags at an angel, could we?). 

Miriam jokes that this Christmas party is becoming her entire personality. And it really has been a...monumental effort. She had plans to use weekly activities to prepare for the event, but her ideas were mostly shot down. And so we find ourselves doing all the fun prep work alone. 

Benjamin spent the afternoon cutting out climbing bears on the scroll saw, for example, an activity Miriam proposed the youth could do (but which was shot down because saw are dangerous and no one would want to do that, anyway—he is trying to make one bear per family in the primary). 

Incorporating the placement and shape of the holes was a little trickier than we expected...and I fell asleep thinking about how to do that and...dreamt about this Christmas tree design last night. Literally—this party is so much on my mind (on everyone's mind) that I dreamed up this triangle-inspired Christmas tree in my sleep. 

I painted the background, the triangle branches, and the trunk while Miriam took a midterm.

Then she used a potato to add some ornaments:

We're going to use a permanent marker to draw a star on the top of the tree in the halo atop the tree:

Now we'll have a dual-purpose beanbag toss in the closet and in a few years no one will remember who painted it or why. But perhaps it'll get pulled out for a party down the road.