For my son's sixth birthday we hosted a medieval joust at our house - what little boy isn't fascinated by knights? We handmade the invitation on parchment paper with the edges burned, and gold sticker seal to make it official. On the computer we found old English font - it read: "their royal majesties, King Michael & Queen Laura, hereby invite all loyal subjects of noble birth to a tournament of knights in honor of Sir Tyler Richard's sixth season." It went on to give the date, time, location (...in the year of our lord 2002!), and guests were invited to garb themselves in princess or knightly attire. I went to Loews Home Improvement and they were nice enough to give me an empty refrigerator box. I painted it blue, drew bricks, and cut it out to look like a castle with drawbridge ( I cut the strings because I was afraid a party guest may trip).  It made an awesome photo backdrop when the guests arrived.  I also sat Tyler on a throne in front of it while opening gifts - those pictures turned out great! I staked multi-color flags along our walk (wooden dolls with $1 fabric from Wal-Mart glued on), had our wooden rocking horses on our porch with red, blue and purple balloons tied to the handles, and had medieval trumpet music playing as guests arrived. On the lamppost I had a banner with Tyler's initials. Guests received either a knight's helmet or princess hat (I bought them, but have seen craft ideas to make them). Their welcome activity was to decorate a shield / crest. I had pre-cut them out of poster board and covered them with tinfoil, I used leather for the strap.  I provided glitter glue, gems, and different "emblems". I decorated the lunch table (the knights of the round table!)  with red and purple table cloth, and made goblets out of plastic wine glasses with gems glued on.. Lunch was dragon claws (pb&j cut out with round cookie cutter and raisin toe nails), wizard wands (hot dogs skewered with dough wrapped around in spiral), dragon scales (sliced grapes), and magical Merlin drink (Sprite with red, blue, yellow colored ice cubes, melted to change pop colors).  I can't bake so I had the grocer make a dragon cake and then I sat a toy knight on it.  I roped off the tournament area in our backyard using the flag banners – made sure I contained the party guests since my yard is not fenced in. The joust consisted of "Slay the dragon" - (dragon piñata), Javelin toss (wrapping paper tube with tinfoil arrow, tossed through hula-hoop), Dragon tag (directions on FamilyFun.com – use pudding box to make Dragon puppet and lined up guests holding the waist of child ahead of them. The dragon head is the child with the pudding box puppet, he/she has to tag the tale.), and the most favorite activity was digging for treasure out of a small sandbox (I buried gems and coins a plenty!). I think it's fun for the guests to get a gift too, so I made up a game of "Pull the sword from the stone". While the guests were eating lunch I told the tale of King Arthur and how he pulled the sword from the stone to become king.  I had made stone out of Styrofoam spray painted gray. I used the plastic sword tooth picks and dotted about half of them with red paint. We went around the table and each guest had 4 tries to pull a red tipped sword from the stone (of course they all won), and they got to pick a wrapped prize out of the grab bag.  We concluded the party with a knight ceremony - my husband played the king.  Each child received an official certificate and either an inflatable sword or star wand.  Guests' goodie bags were purchased from BirthdayExpress.com - castle boxes with either the prince or princess contents. I also found small knight toys at the Dollar tree, and toy unicorns for the girls. I added gem ring pops too.   I had a treasure chest filled with toy jewels and each child got to loot it before going.  After all the guests left we took my son and a friend to the dinner theater, Medieval Times. He thought he had died and gone to heaven was his birthday weekend was over!