My daughter was born 8 days after Christmas and so as you can imagine, my husband and I are already planning for the future and have sort of made a pact with one another to always make her birthday special. You know how it is… after Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s you are drained… right? Well, our goal is to make sure that we just don’t let her birthday be overshadowed and to make sure sure she always feels like her birthday is a special celebration.

The great plus to this theme for a party is that it’s extremely budget friendly. With a little planning ahead, you can pick-up holiday items on deep discount that would work great.

Here’s some highlights of what we did for our daughter’s first birthday party…

Theme: Winter One-derland

Invitations: I picked up a couple of boxes of square Christmas cards from our local Hobby Lobby and modified them. They had snowflakes embossed on the front, so I cut holes and laced pink grosgrain ribbon through the top to make them look a little more like a custom printed invite. I also printed pink snowflakes on the outside of the envelopes.

Invitation Verbiage: Here’s what I printed in the inside of the invite…

Then I listed all the normal details like the fact that we were serving lunch, etc. I also set-up an e-mail address with my daughter’s name for RSVP’s so we could print those out for her scrapbook.

Decorations: We basically just used anything snowy or with snowflakes and that was pink or white. This was actually a little bit of a challenge since most of the decorations out there with snowflakes on them are blue and white. So, this party is definitely easier to plan if you chose a blue and white theme.

Since it was just family I got to have fun with sentimental type decorations. I made a big “Happy Birthday” banner from felt. Hopefully this will be one of those items we bring out year after year and my daughter looks forward to seeing her banner each year.

We had a small pre-lit pink Christmas tree, a white lit snowflake that I borrowed from my mother-in-law, I used a pink table cloth that was in with the Valentine’s day stuff at Home Goods. I found a beautiful pink birthday plate at Home Good also that we will be able to use from year to year.

I love grosgrain ribbon, so I tied it on just about anything I could to spruce things up… the handle of the ice scoop the dessert server… it just made things look soft and pretty like a little girls party should.

Menu: Since we had family over and this was a pretty big occasion being the 1st birthday we did feed a full lunch to everyone. Our menu included cold weather treats like homemade white chicken chili, Caesar salad, spinach dip, BLT bites and more. It was actually a fairly budget friendly menu to feed a large group. Instead of sodas we did pink lemonade, tea, water, coffee and that sort of thing.

For sweets, we did a hot cocoa bar. I made pink and white cupcakes. We had a variety of pink and white candies… and anything that sort of fit in. Our local Kroger sent us a coupon for a free cake for our daughter’s first birthday and we had that for her smash cake. It was this really cute little cake and perfect for her first cake… still can’t believe it was free.
Party Favor: Since we had only family, it was grown-ups older kids, I didn’t need to do a party favor bag for little ones, but I still wanted to send each family home with a little something special as a memento, so I made little candles from baby food jars. I used glass paint to paint some pink polka dots, sprayed the lids silver with some chrome paint we had in the garage, filled them with wax, wicks, etc. to make candles (picked up the supplies at Michael’s) and tied a ribbon to top them off.