Rudolph-themed Christmas Party

My co-room mom and I selected a "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" theme for our classroom's holiday party this year. I enlisted my dear friend Bird, of Bird's Party, to design a set of reindeer printables for me. She came up with a cute, modern design featuring a white reindeer--how adorable!!

Check out the invitations from the printables collection. I backed the invitations on scrapbook paper, also from the printables collection.

Since we were on a tight budget ($125 total budget for snacks, drinks, activities and favors for 22 children!), there was a lot of DIY and repurposing that went into this party. 

The party kicked off with a visit from Santa. The children were then divided into three groups for the activities. We made jingle bell necklaces using red, green and white ribbon and small bells to assign children to each group. The groups then rotated between three stations: (i) Crafts--making reindeer antlers and red noses to wear at the party, (ii) Story Time--the story of Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer (of course!), and (iii) Games--Pin the Nose on the Reindeer (which consisted of pinning "red noses" on a reindeer pinata) and a Magic Reindeer Food station (details below). 

To drink, we served hot chocolate with marshmallows and bottled water. The reindeer paper cups were an easy DIY. The water bottles were embellished with bottle wraps from the printables collection. 

Red gable boxes (left over from the Spiderman party) embellished with cupcake toppers from the printables collection and inexpensive baubles ($1 for a tube of 12 from Target), housed Rudolph bath sponges ($1 from Jo-Ann Fabrics & Crafts) and decorated sugar cookies to take home.

The Rudolph cupcakes are chocolate cupcakes, embellished with Nilla wafers, pretzels and M&Ms. 

The Rudolph candy canes were an easy DIY. To make, simply twist a pipe cleaner around the top of the candy cane, bend into "antlers", add googly eyes and a red pom pom nose. Easy! 

Since we didn't really have a budget for decorations, we reused the red lanterns from the Spiderman party and some red stockings that my co-room mom had from an event she'd previously hosted. 

We used bulletin board paper to line the tables, instead of buying table cloths. The gable boxes, reindeer cups, water bottles, reindeer candy canes and red napkins wrapped around peppermints rounded out the tablescape. 

For one of our activities, we set up a Magic Reindeer Food station--bowls of oatmeal, sugar sprinkles, marshmallows and crushed peppermint. The children had a great time filling reindeer paper bags with scoops of each item, to take home to scatter on the lawn on Christmas Eve for Rudolph and his friends! A lot of the recipes for Magic Reindeer Food that we saw online contained glitter, but we decided to skip the glitter since it's not biodegradable and could hurt animals if ingested--we used sugar sprinkles instead. 

The reindeer paper bags for the Magic Reindeer Food was also an easy DIY, using paper bags, construction paper for antlers, googly eyes and red pom poms.