Crawfish Boil

Crawfish Boil... We had a great crawfish boil for 4th of July last year.  We printed the invitations on flag stationary from the office supply store.  For the food we ordered the crawfish from a seafood supply company in Austin.  You pick them up the night before in a huge ice chest and prop the lid open so they can breath (yes, they're live!).  We had a huge white, open-sided tent set up over the patio and hung white icicle lights around the edge.  Then we rented two, 25' long tables and covered them with white plastic table clothes and newspaper spread in the middle.  To decorate I used patriotic decorations (flags, buntings, ribbons, wreaths,..)  My husband helped me download Zydeco music and Cajun favorites that we burned onto a cd for the party music.  For party favors,I saved all the glass milk bottles from my favorite coffee drink and peeled the labels off and washed them.  Inside them I put (red) cinnamon candies, then (white) Hershey kisses, and finally the small (blue) Almond Joy bites and stuck a mini flag in each one.  These  were set on a red and blue striped tray that sat on the kitchen table.  I also made "cracker" for the kids.  You take toilet paper rolls and put candy inside.  Then you wrap it with red and blue tissue paper and tie with white curling ribbon.  I filled up a huge, silver pedestal bowl with the crackers and tied a red, white, and blue ribbon around the base.  It looked beautiful.  We have a long, kitchen island that we set up a buffet on of potato salad, coleslaw, chafing dishes of brisket and red beans and rice.  Outside we had a huge boiling pot with Cajun spices, red potatoes, corn on the cob and finally our little mud bugs!  We had a huge red bucket to dump cooked crawfish onto the tables with and when the pile was eaten we just scooped up the newspaper and dumped it in the garbage.  For the red dipping sauce I used little galvanized buckets filled with ice and set glass bowls filled with sauce inside.  After dark everyone drug lawn chairs to our driveway to watch the fireworks the city sets off at the park up our street.  We had around 40+ guests with kids and we ate around 40+ pounds of crawfish!