What do you get when you mix a bunch of strangers, a few familiar faces, mince pies, Christmas decorations, Bloggers, Butlins, wine, prunes and Prizes?

Why the Tots 100 Christmas party of course! 🙂

I was very lucky to attend the Tots 100 Christmas party at the weekend. Held at Butlins in Bognor Regis, West Sussex I wasn’t quite sure what to expect even though I had, of course, done quite a bit of looking at the site online. My only experience of a holiday camp was staying in a caravan in Weymouth twenty eight years ago! My memories of that holiday are quite positive apart from the rain and the slugs that came out every night when we had to make our way back to the caravan after the entertainment.
However it was not a caravan that I was staying in it was the Ocean hotel, which only opened in 2009 and I was pleasantly surprised. I won’t bore you with a big review of the hotel but having stayed in many fab places I would be more than happy to take my children there and make the most of the spacious rooms and onsite facilities. You usually get what you pay for but at Butlins Bognor Regis I would say you get a lot more!

Sally got the party going with a ‘breaking the ice’ exercise of decorating Christmas trees. That shouldn’t be hard now should it? Put thirty odd women in a room with great prizes at stake, four Christmas trees, presents to wrap and hundreds of decorations and what do you get? A bunfight, competitiveness and stealing, myself included! Actually we had great fun, I thought the bloggers in team ‘C’  all worked together and we produced a great theme of gold, red and silver…plus a fantastic poem made up by Wendy. Alas even the poem did not win the judges over and we lost out to a Christmas ‘hatted’ tree. Albeit a great tree with a rather ingenious Father Christmas face in it we were still robbed. 😉

Fast forward to the evening, I was so ‘busy’ enjoying my me time that I very nearly missed the Cocktail party…and rather nice it was too. After a Cranberry cocktail we headed to Turners ,the restaurant which opened earlier this year and promises a ‘Traditional British Menu with a slight modern twist’. It had a lovely atmosphere and it felt good to sit in a ‘proper’ restaurant after surveying the vast array of fast food places on the site the night before. I’m not sure if I was sitting at the lively end of the table or whether everywhere was just the same but the company was great and made the evening a lot of fun. To eat we had a Parsnip Soup with a great addition of hazlenuts ( think I’m going to steal that idea) followed by roast Turkey plus trimmings. I was especially impressed that the vegetables were crisp, just how I like them. Now, having seen some tweets and posts about the dessert I have to admit that not in a million years would I have chosen Poached winter fruits and cinnamon ice cream off a dessert menu. However, I have to eat humble pie too because I really enjoyed it, yes even the prunes, and it was a light and refreshing end to the meal…plus there were mince pies with coffee anyway.

I love a party…and a boogie, so was all up for a dance with some of the bloggers but I somehow followed the wrong people and ended up in the bar of the Ocean hotel instead with Jen, Vic, Alex, Ruth and Amy which was more than fine and probably the most sensible option knowing how easily influenced and impressionable I am *cough* and the words ‘What happened in Butlins stays in Butlins’ has been mentioned a fair few times since the weekend.

It was lovely to meet Jenny at last, catch up with Joanne,  Liska and Kerry plus my late night bar buddies (actually it wasn’t late at all but we stayed until they turned the lights out) and a big thank you to Sally who organised the whole weekend, I had a lovely time.

Excuse the lack of evening pictures…I was too busy having a great time and forgot to take any!