The Party Wall: Nutcracker-inspired Christmas Party

This party, which I organized for my son's Kindergarten class, was inspired by the classic Christmas story of The Nutcracker. The party coincided with the class's study of the story of The Nutcracker and Tchaikovsky's ballet, which made it even more fun--and educational--for the kids. The party was also very budget-friendly-the entire party cost under $100! Take a look.

I kept to a traditional Christmas color palette of red, green and white and created some Nutcracker-inspired printable bottle wraps to dress up the milk bottles and water bottles.

For snack, we served fruit and a homemade "mouse king cookie".

The cookie is a white chocolate dipped Oreo topped with chocolate mouse. The mouse body is a chocolate dipped cherry. The head is a Hershey's Kiss. The ears are slices almonds and the eyes are white sprinkles, with the pupils drawn on with edible marker.

For the activities and games, we divided the children into three groups and gave each group different colored jingle bell necklaces to wear. We then rotated the groups through 3 activity stations. The necklaces helped to keep things organized when rotating through activities.

The first station was a story telling station where the teacher read the Nutcracker story to the group.

The second station was Christmas-themed Bingo. We used jelly beans for markers00many were eaten along the way, but we did eventually hit a few "bingos"!

The third station was the most fun--the children created their own Nutcracker-themed snow globes. They had a great time making them and the finished snow globes made a cute keepsake for them to take home.

We decorated with Nutcrackers brought in by the teachers. I would have loved to have Nutcrackers at each table as centerpieces, but it simply wasn't in the budget....

So I improvised by using Nutcracker-themed wine bottle bags as centerpieces instead! It still gave the effect of having nutcrackers as a centerpieces, but at a fraction of the cost.