For my son's first birthday we wanted something simple and that he would absolutely love. So, we decided to go with "ELMO". Since my son lives for Elmo movies, toys and everything he sees of the red monster. We held the party at our back yard since most recommend you hold first birthday parties at a familiar place. I bought all the paperwear at Party City. With the theme of ELMO'S WORLD. The invitations were also from the same theme, in order to make them a little nicer I used Elmo stickers to decorate the envelope and I placed a crayon in each invitation for the child at home to color when they received the invitation. (The Elmo inside comes in black and white) To match the theme and so it could be a little cheaper, I only bought the printed cups, plates and table cloth for the kids table. Which I rented at a local party store. I had a place sitting for all the children which were 10 including my son. They all had primary color chairs which I also rented. For my son I bought him a special ELMO chair which his grandmother found at a local Walgreens. I placed that one at the head of the table. Each chair had a balloon attached to it to add height and color. For the decoration I spread lolly pops around the table and a matching themed party hat. As the center piece I used the already made ELMO center piece to match the theme. The cake I purchased at a bakery near my house, I bought the cake decoration at K-Mart which was an ELMO'S WORLD set. (It brought the whole theme, Elmo, The Piano, Mr. Noodle, the gold fish ect...) The good thing is that it was great to match the theme and a great after toy. I used a red table cloth also found at Party City and Balloons to decorate the table. I had two Elmo face helium baloons attached to each back corner with lower latex balloons that said 1st Birthday . I placed My childs favorite Elmo dolls around the cake for an extra familiar touch. It looked great and it served also as a nice picture set. The adult cups, plates, napkins, utensils were plain red which I purchased at the Dollar store. For food I made a buffet line complete with Macarroni salad, sandwiches, chips, dip, and everything else adults mights like to have. For the kids I had gold fish crackers (to represent his pet Dorothy), chicken nuggets, Elmo fruit punch (fruit juice boxes with his face I found at the dollar store), cup cakes (which my sister in law decorated her self with marshmellows with a miniture baking chocolate hershey kiss for the eyes. An orange jelly bean for the nose and lots of red icing for the face color and black jell icing for the mouth.) For entertaining I hired an Elmo with a friend clown which sang Elmo tunes and played non competetive games, she also painted faces, and did balloon animals. To my surprise my son loved to see Elmo live and we were able to take lots of memorable pictures and video with his amazing friend.  We had an Elmo pinata which I used from a recycled pinata found at a thrift shop. I just changed the color of the streamers to blue and used a helium baloon on each side with Elmo's face." The party lasted a little longer than 2 hours. All the kids had lots of fun. And the parents too, we even had some parents join the clown games and pinata. Just as the party was about to end we gave each child a thank you party bag with Elmo related favors inside.(crayons, elmo stickers, bubbles, balls, ect... the bags where good for boys and for girls with unisex items which help at time of giving them out)It helps to have an extra or two of everything in case an unexpected child guest shows up. Hopefully you find good party ideas here!