Christmas Party Ideas for the Children

There are lots of things you can do to make the average Christmas Party more children firendly.  After all, at least for this old bald guy watching the childrens faces light up around Christmas festivities is one of my favorite parts of Christmas.

One of the things that we have used over the years is to have each parent bring a present for their children and then have someone (usually my neighbor who is really into being Santa) come stop by at some point in the evening to stop and visit.  He has the small gift that the parent has brought for each child that is there and as the parent has supplied the gift it is always something that was on their list.

Now it is important that if you are going to do this that you set a value for the gift that the parent brings or this can become a fiasco.  Somehow, Johnny is not quite happy with Santa if he got a small gift and Joey gets the latest video game console.  We always went with a $10 to $15 limit on the gifts to avoid this type of problem.  You can use whatever limit you wish but do make sure that the gifts for the various children are of a similar nature.

It can be really enjoyable to see all of the children's faces when Santa just happens to stop by in the middle of the party.

Here are a few other ideas that you can do that work especially well to help the children enjoy themselves if you are having an open house type party.

If you have the space try to set up an area just for the young ones to play.  Somehow the conversations between adults bore the children quite quickly.  Now we had a finished basement and would set up the tv and dvd down there to show the latest Christmas movies or whatever else they want to see.  This allows the adults to interact and the children to stay happy.  Nothing worse than having a bored child whlie trying to have a conversation.

We often would have our favorite babysitter be the hostess for the children and supervise games to keep the children occupied and allow the adults to mingle in the other room without having to worry about supervising the children.  Try this and I am sure that you will find it is money well spent and allows all ages to have an enjoyable time.

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