My daughter's birthday is at the end of December so we decided to do a Christmas themed birthday party this year. Believe it or not, we've never done that before!  I decided to have the party at the beginning of the month before everyone's calendars got booked and so I could then concentrate on getting ready for Christmas! 

INVITATIONS: my daughter likes the Charlie Brown Christmas movie so I made my own invitations on the computer. I found a clip art picture of Charlie Brown and the gang around a Christmas tree and put that on the front. I put the word's It's Erin's birthday Charlie Brown!" On the inside cover I put another clip art picture of Charlie Brown and Snoopy on his dog house and put the party details inside as well. 

DECORATIONS: the party was in our finished basement. We usually don't do much christmas decorating down there but of course for the party we did. I hung up colored christmas lights going across the beam that goes across the room on both sides. I also hung some white icicle lights in the corners of the room. We set up a table top christmas tree on our train table and had colorful lights on it as well. I put red and gold garland around our verticle beams in the room and had various other decorations around the room. We bought a musical Charlie Brown Christmas tree which we had on display and I also had some red green and white helium balloons grouped in a few spots around the room. I had some christmas music playing and also had a cinnamon scented candle burning to add to the festive mood. 

ACTIVITIES/GAME: As the girls arrived my daughter first had them help decorate the table top tree. I had a basket out with small ornaments with hooks on them.  Then they did a simple snowman craft. I found a kit at Target with plain foam snowmen bodies and it came with different foam accessories to stick onto the snowmen such as sparkly scarves hats earmuffs noses arms buttons eyes and mouths. I had punched holes in the top so they could make them into ornaments if they wanted to.  Then we moved on to our main activity which was decorating Gingerbread Houses.  I had found a great kit at Costco. For $10 each you get a big gingerbread house--pre-built! A huge tube of white icing with a tip for piping a smaller pack of red and green icing various packs of candy and an additional Christmas tree and 2 gingerbread men to decorate. I bought one kit for each girl.

I had two tables set up and each spot had a gingerbread house and their individual icings and then I emptied all the candy from each kit into bowls and put them all down the center of the table so they could pick and choose what they wanted to use.  They had a really good time decorating and made some great houses!  They worked on their houses for about an hour.  Some kids didn't get to their christmas trees or gingerbread men so they took them home with them to decorate later. Game: Next the kids played Christmas Charades. I had found a website where you could print out sheets that had different categories and words or phrases for the kids to act out all Christmas themed. It was very informal and the kids didn't have to act anything out if they didn't want to. They had a lot of fun with this game. For the last part of the party my daughter wanted to put on the Charlie Brown Christmas movie. It's only about 20 minutes or so so I decided while they have their cupcakes I could put the movie on.

PARTY SNACKS:  I made cupcakes that looked like tree ornaments.  I frosted half of the cupcakes pink and half blue and on the pink I piped green icing gel around and red icing on the blue ones. I put red and green M&M's around them and topped them off with an upside down mini Reeses candy.  I put a curved portion of a small pretzel twist inside the Reeses candy for the hook. Since they were watching a movie I also popped some popcorn and had a small bowl of red and green M&M's out. For drinks they had bottled water or a Roarin' Waters which is a flavored water pouch drink. Near the end of the movie my daughter opened her birthday presents.

PARTY FAVORS: The kids went home with their gingerbread houses which I was able to pack up in the original boxes the kit came in. This was nice so there would be no mess for the ride home. They also took home their snowman craft and a small bag of Christmas candy which included a candy cane a handful of Hershey Kisses and some mini Kit Kats. This was a fun party and fun to plan. The nice thing about the older kids is that they didn't need a ton of supervision and they just enjoyed being together!"