Feature/General
Birthday Party Themes
By Christy Hyer
October 2003

Whether your child wants a total Disney princess party complete with live Snow White and Cinderella or a simple get together with a few friends and family, planning a party with a theme can be easy.

Themes
Pick a theme that can easily be achieved and one your child will not change his or her mind about eight hours later. There is nothing worse than buying matching Nemo plates, forks, tablecloth and pinata only to return home to a child convinced that only a fire truck party will do.

Be flexible with the theme. My daughter had a November 8th birthday, but we had her party the weekend of Halloween. Halloween would have been an easily achievable theme. All sorts of ready-made items were available. I did not want her birthday to compete with the school Halloween parties or the huge Halloween blow-out several of my friends put together.

Emma had a fall festival party. The children dressed up in their Halloween costumes, bobbed for apples and trekked through a corn maze. We used pumpkins, scarecrows and fall leaves. I was able to use the same decorations later for Thanksgiving.

Invitations
Invitations are the first thing a guest sees and are easy to mess up. Busy moms seem to have trouble making the two-weeks-ahead deadline. To save yourself a lot of headache down the road, spend time getting organized. Go through your address book and put a complete address list in your computer. This list can then be mail-merged for printing envelopes for any occasion.

My daughter will look at an invitation stuck to the fridge every morning to make sure she has not missed a party. The invitation serves as a reminder but also should be used to set the stage and create interest in a party. Remember your audience and plan accordingly.

If this is a first birthday with lots of children under two, you may want the invitation to be tactile, such as a fuzzy chick on the front. Cutting up fake fur will simulate a chick’s down very easily. A skeleton key tied to a Harry Potter invitation works the same way. The invited children will wonder for two weeks what the key unlocks. A pair of stick-on earrings would be great for a dress up party.

Decorations
The paper products for Emma’s fall festival party were all solid orange, not decorated with pumpkins or other graphics. Purchase solid color products – yellow or red always work nicely. Use them and then store the rest in a storage container. Put all the leftover napkins, cups, etc., in it. Leftovers can be used on picnics or included in a delivery of food to a family with a new baby.

Also, it is easier to make basic colors “blend.” Stock up on red. Use them for the fire truck birthday party, the Valentine’s Day party at school, and the office Christmas party. It is hard to reuse those Baby Boy baby shower plates but, if they are solid blue, they will be great for Easter.

Watch for the Party City stock up sale ad in the Sunday newspaper. Purchase a few standard colors to keep on hand. Again, store them in the Rubbermaid container until you need them. If all your party stuff is in one place and you don’t have to buy it again every time you need a few plates you will save money.

My favorite thing is going crazy in Michael’s. My least favorite is when I have spent $200 on crepe paper and pipe cleaners. Decorations can be the most expensive part of any party. There are several ways to combat this.

Use the cake as the centerpiece. A small card table dedicated to the cake works well. What child, or adult for that matter, is not drawn to a beautiful cake? The cake is an event unto itself.

I have discovered a fabulous butcher paper from Thorton Brothers, located in downtown Athens. It is not shiny and takes paint very well. It is also much thicker than newsprint or the paper teachers put on bulletin boards. A 4-foot-tall roll costs about $40. That sounds like a huge investment but I have used the same roll for 9 months. I use it almost every day for some project. Not just for parties – I use it to cover my kitchen table for the children’s art project and I spray paint on it.

At Emma’s birthday, we created a corn maze by driving 1x2 wood stakes in the ground and running butcher paper along it. We painted corn stalks along the paper. The paper is sturdy enough to take a licking and until the birthday girl decided it was time to harvest the corn, the maze stayed up.

Invest in a roll of paper or buy one together with a friend. Use your imagination. Create a huge gingerbread house for a Christmas party and let the door be your house’s front door. Let the children crawl through the opening.

Create a photo board. A sheet of MDF (medium density fiber board) is about $13 at Lowe’s. Have it cut in half before you leave the store. Purchase four shelf brackets (don’t forget the screws) and attach the brackets to the MDF so that the board stands up on its own. If you are having a Bob the Builder party, paint a picture of Bob on his tractor. Now cut out his head so that your guests can put their head through for a photo – great in the goodie bags or in thank you notes.

Pick a design easy enough to copy onto a large surface. If you are artistically challenged, renting an overhead projector from Barron’s Rental costs about $20 a day. Also, you will need to jig saw out the face whole. An inexpensive jigsaw runs about $20 and is an invaluable tool. Once you start jigsawing items it is hard to stop. You could just have one board for every occasion, just painting over the last design.

Activities
Age-appropriate is the buzz word here. At a first birthday, just having kids crawl around and poke each other in the eyes is enough. Emma’s birthday was at 10 a.m., giving the kids time to get worn out before going home to nap. It was much longer than the average party. Miss Lollipop did her magic show, we bobbed for apples, played in the maze, took pictures and went “fishing” for prizes.

I served lunch so parents were not rushed to get to the drive thru before the kids passed out. Again, forward thinking is the key. Keep a schedule. Don’t let time lag between activities and if you start to see too many children having “melt-downs,” sing and cut the cake. This allows parents to take their whiney kids home without the “I have not had cake” fight. Be considerate of your guests and your party will be remembered as wonderful no matter what happens. Nothing spoils a party like seeing a child carried out kicking and screaming.

Fake the Cake
Using Styrofoam for the bottom section of a cake is an inexpensive way to maximize its decoration power without leaving you with enough leftover cake to last months. Floral Styrofoam is easy to cut with a steak knife. Icing covers all sins so don’t be afraid of it. Cover the entire cake with white icing and let it set for about an hour. This is called crumb coating and it will save you the trouble of making so much colored icing.

Frosting:
1 box 10x sugar
1 stick Crisco (in the blue wrapper)
1 tbs Meringue powder (at Michaels and Wal-Mart)
1 tbs CLEAR vanilla
1 tbs CLEAR butter flavor
About 1/4 cup water, added slowly – it may take more, may take less

The easiest way to do a cake is to pick a shape that you can’t mess up such as a square or a circle. I did a pumpkin at Emma’s because a big orange round thing had to be either a pumpkin or a basketball. Everyone recognized what it was even though it was not perfect.

Goody Bags
For a goody bag, the Number 10 can is a party planner’s dream come true. These are the big cans you get from Sam’s when you buy green beans to serve 30 people. About a month before a party, call the school cafeteria or a favorite restaurant and ask them to save you some.

Wash them out very well and drill holes in the sides. There may be some sharp edges. Lay the can on its side, with the sharp edge on the garage floor. With your hammer, hit the can from the inside until the edge breaks off. Run ribbon, rope, raffia, whatever, through the two holes to make a handle.
Emma helped me paint them orange for the party. Green fun foam was cut in the shape of a pumpkin leaf and a curly green pipe cleaner completed the pumpkin look. I put green tissue paper on the inside to finish them off.

At Easter, paint them pastel and decorate them like eggs. At Halloween, paint them lime green and create a Frankenstein. Construction paper feathers make a great Thanksgiving turkey. Think outside of the box, or can, in this case.

Consider giving each child an eight-pack of crayons and something to decorate. Wooden trains or a small jewelry box are great examples. These items, again found at Michaels, cost about what a lot of little breakable items would cost and they last much longer.

Last year at Emma’s Halloween party at Emmanuel Episcopal Church Preschool, I took a class picture first thing in the morning. All the children had on their costumes. I ran to Wolf Camera downtown and had them developed in an hour. At the party, the children decorated small picture frames with Halloween stickers. Several parents have told me those frames are still in their children’s room.

Take six or seven different picture of the same group. Give each kid the one they look the best in. There is nothing like getting a group picture where everyone else’s child looks angelic while yours has their tongue sticking out.

Remember, birthday parties are supposed to be fun. Don’t go overboard if that is not your style. Or, if you are a details driven person that tends to be a perfectionist, pick one or two things that are very important to you and concentrate on them. Don’t get caught up in every single detail because then a party is not a party, it is work.

Christy Hyer is married to Lee and has two children, Emma, 4, and Evan, 18 months. She is the new Director of Programs and Member Services at the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce and is now planning her Christmas Parade Party.