A Victorian nursery rhyme says "Sugar and Spice and everything nice, that's what little girls are made of." Hosting a Sugar and Spice Tea Party is a great way to have a lot of fun while pretending to be grown up. Children can help with preparation activities such as like preparing finger sandwiches, decorating cookies, to arranging flowers as place markers at the table. Guests can be invited to bring dress up clothes or vintage style hats or, alternatively the hostess can furnish a selection of dress up items (look at your local Goodwill for some great items at little cost).
The dressed up ladies may enjoy participating in a treasure hunt. The hostess hides a jewelry box full of old fashioned costume jewelry (brooches, necklaces, bracelets, etc.) ? the perfect fashion accessories for the dress up game. Then, provide riddles or poems to help the children figure out where the items are hid. Each clue takes them to another, and to another, and so on. For example, a starting clue could be something like: ?Welcome ladies, a treasure you will find, if you follow all the clues that I have left behind. Ring! Ring! Hello? If you need to find the phone, where would you go?? Of course the guests will head straight to the nearest phone where another clue tag hangs waiting for them. Other clue hiding locations could be in plants, under chairs, behind pictures, in the garden, anywhere inside or outside that you can think of. Make the clues easy enough the guests can find them quickly and have enough clues to run around having fun. Finally, have them find the jewelry box and then they can all put on jeweled accessories to go with their hats and dresses! Or, alternatively, you can have various plastic gems, trims, and other shiny decorative items in the jewelry box and then have basic wood cutouts with jewelry pins attached on the back of them. The guests can design their own jeweled treasures by gluing stones, trims, laces, and other shiny items onto the wooden shape cutouts. Each guest then has a great keepsake of the Sugar and Spice Tea Party afternoon. Once they have their proper accessories, it is time for the fashion show. Put on some music, create a run way and watch them model their fashions. Taking digital pictures will allow you to send each of the young ladies home with pictures of their modeling debut.
One last game that is fun and easy to set up is a tea cup relay. Divide the guests into two teams. Put a tea cup on a table behind each team of guests. Give each guest their own sugar cube to hold. Then, give one team member a tea spoon (the smaller it is the harder!). Each member will place their sugar cube on the tea spoon and run the relay race track without touching the sugar cube with their hands (if it falls off, they can use their hands to pick it back up). Then, when they get back to the beginning, they drop their cub into their team?s teacup and pass the spoon to the next member in line. First team that gets all their cubes in their teacup wins.
Finish the Sugar and Spice afternoon off with a sit down tea party complete with cups, saucers, fresh flowers, and some sugar and spice cookie treats. This party will be one each of the guests remember for a long time. Enjoy!
Moreen Torpy is the De-Clutter Coach, a Trained Professional Organizer, Author, and Speaker. Let's Get Organized: 172 tiplets to simplify life is her first published work. See http://www.decluttercoach.ca to subscribe to Let's Get Organized, her monthly e-zine and purchase the booklet.