Host your own Party at the North Pole

A few years ago, I saw a post by the lovely Kelle Hampton about party at the north pole she threw for her little girl. My own little girl was 2 at the time but I knew I wanted to recreate that magic in my house as soon as I possibly could.

This year was the year.

Though it was my third party in almost as many months and we’ve always been quite minimalist with our holiday decorations, I really had a blast planning this one. There is just something about buying tons of red and white ribbon and designing signs and labels with candy canes and reindeer that makes one get into the holiday spirit.

So much so that I went a bit overboard. Going overboard is not required. This is actually a really simple little thing to pull together. So if you’re hoping to create a little magic before this season ends, or want to store some ideas away for next year (or whenever your kids are ready) here’s how I did it.

Reindeer Food Bar

• Cover tables in red and white table plastic cloths. We got the red ones at Target. The white ones were tougher to find; we found them at our local grocery store. I designed the sign using PicMonkey, printed it on 8.5×11 inch paper and then glued it to some cardstock before taping it to the table. Here’s the sign:

• We used tin foil bread pans with a holiday design, found at Michael’s. Our food options included: oats, cocoa powder, silver glitter, red glitter, flying powder (coconut), and raisins. Next time, we’ll probably swap out cocoa powder and find another ingredient to swap in. The cocoa sort of went everywhere and was a bit of a tougher mess to clean up afterwards!

• The awesome little labels for the ingredients came from Kelle Hampton. You can access that free printable here.

• Mason jars came from Target. I designed the label using PicMonkey and printed on 2×4 inch labels we also got at Target. Here’s the label. (If you plan to use it next year, you’ll have to change the date!)

• I tied a bow with bakers twine around the top of each jar. Bakers twine from More Sprinkled Joy. Many of the bows fell off. A little hot glue could have helped.

Make an Ornament

In one version of my plans for the fairy princess birthday party, we would fill small plastic ornaments with fairy dust. Turned out that those little ornaments could hold quite a lot of fairy dust (sand and glitter) and could easily grow too heavy for the tops to hold onto them. So we had a pile of ornaments (purchased from Michaels). Thanks to a few ideas on Pinterest, we headed back to Michaels and bought ribbons and bells and pom poms in Christmas colors to fill them with. The end result is beautiful no matter what little hands cram in there.

This one made a great floor activity. Spread packing paper out and decorate it with holiday stamps.

Cookie Table

Create a snow effect using a generous amount of pillow filling (from, yep you guessed it, Michaels). Place small, battery operated tea lights throughout. And those little trees? A last minute find from Trader Joes. Glitter trees, they’re called. My girl could not have been more thrilled.

Enjoy the moment

One thing I didn’t do this year that I fully intend to do next year is enjoy the moment. Really dive in and just be in the moment with the little girls and the magic. Ah next year.