Frugal Children's Parties

IF you need to save money, make one of your New Year’s resolutions to spend less on children’s parties.

It seems that these days mums try to outdo each other with the lavishness of their entertainment and party bags. Do you really need to hire a clown or a magician? Or spend hundreds on holding a party in a fast food restaurant? Do you need to spend more on gifts for the little dears to take home than the Gross National Product of a small country? No, of course not.

When I was a child (admittedly many moons ago), there were parties with musical chairs, pin the tail on the donkey and pass the parcel with a birthday tea of cheap jelly and icecream. Guests brought presents; they weren’t sent home with bags packed with the contents of Toys R Us.

Birthdays are supposed to be special but ‘special’ needn’t mean expensive. You will find that scaling back on celebrations will make them better - certainly less stressful - by putting the focus back where it was supposed to be all along, on the children. You don’t need cash – you just need a little imagination.

One of my friends cut costs drastically by holding a Fairy Party for her six-year-old daughter. All the guests came dressed as fairies - there would have been elves too if her daughter had wanted any boys at the party. The food was lots of tiny little nibbles – “fairy food” - including little open sandwiches the size of a 50p coin, miniature sausages cut into three, individual swiss rolls cut into even tinier rolls and little dishes of dolly mixtures and miniature marsh mallows.

There were tiny carrot and celery sticks with dip (served in little receptacles like screw top lids) and plates of fruit chopped into small pieces served with chocolate dip. There were individual birthday cakes - those individual sponge rolls cut up and iced, each with its own candle. The little people all ate daintily and loved the food.

They played “fairy” games with prizes of tiny trophies – cheap egg cups decorated with sparkly bits. The most popular game was one she made up herself called Fairy Forfeits. She bought a packet of chocolate buttons and carved a number on each sweet. She then made a pack of cards. The cards had a number on one side and a Fairy Forfeit on the other. The children took it in turns to pick a button (which they then ate), selected the card with the same number on it and turned it over to read what they had to do – some had to do a fairy dance, some had to make up a fairy song, some had to cast a nice fairy spell.

My friend also choreographed a fairy dance, which they all learned and performed for the adults present. When they went home they each took a cheap plastic wand which she had decorated with ribbons. She reckoned the whole party, including the food, hadn’t cost much more than a tenner – and the children absolutely loved it.

Another friend with a 13-year-old son was filled with trepidation after her experiences at a young teenage boy’s party where the little dears had run riot, throwing food around, yelling and racing about and fighting over who had won the games with their expensive prizes. The poor host was hoarse by the end of the day and had a mountain of debris to clear up. She had a laid on a lavish tea which had cost a fortune, and most ended up ground into the carpet.

No way, am I going through that, my friend thought. She sent all the boys out into the garden and served them hot dogs and beef burgers. The birthday boy had been given an action film DVD as a present which they all settled down to watch after the food with mum bringing round popcorn and ice creams during the “interval”. That was all they did – and there wasn’t one murmur of complaint.

If you have teenage children, take a look at cheap hotel deals. They will love a weekend away where they can make use of hotel facilities like a gym , sauna and tennis courts. You might be surprised at how reasonable the rates are, especially out of season. The North Devon Journal’s Reader Holidays often include a real bargain. Keep a look-out too for holiday coupons in newspapers – one national paper was recently offering very cheap breaks in a Cornish holiday park.

Or have a dressing up party with mum’s dresses and high heels or dad’s T-shirts and big shoes. You could buy some hats in a charity shop or be lucky enough to find some children’s fancy dress costumes. Provide cheap make-up (the boys could use eyeliner pencil to create stubble) and jewellery and old watches and they’re set for hours of fun.

One variation on this is to have lots of strange items in a big bag. The children take it in turns to pick an item (without looking) and have to wear it. They keep picking until all the items are gone. Mum or dad then acts as official photographer to take their pictures with a digital camera and print the results out for them to take home.

Be sensible with the goodie bags. Buy plain bags and decorate them yourself – getting your children to decorate them is even better. For young children you can print off colouring sheets from various children’s activity websites. Pop those in with some cheap crayons. Buy a family bag of cheap sweets and share them out. Have a “themed” goodie bag, like The Cake Shop, which is filled with cheap cakes. Or start a trend and dispense with them altogether. I’m sure the other parents will be thrilled.

My own birthday parties were great. I was born in June so the weather was nearly always good. My mother couldn't be bothered with all that party game stuff; she sent us out to play. I was a farmer's daughter and a health and safety inspector would have had a fit as we climbed over the farmyard machinery with its spikes and blades honed to razor sharpness, clambered to the top of precarious piles of straw bales and made dens in animal pens that no doubt harboured virulent strains of e-coli, salmonella and brucellosis. I'll say one thing for my mother, though, she might have subjected us to the risk of amputation, suffocation and respiratory failure but she did produce a very fine birthday tea....