What do you give a wife or girlfriend for Valentine's Day? Flowers? A restaurant meal? Sure, why not...but something else is needed, don't you think? Something cool like....
a tea party! Yes, a tea party, a real little girl's tea party with a real little girl (or girls) hosting the Valentine couple. Imagine the charm of sitting at the little table with your significant other, surrounded by dolls, and chatting with a little girl...maybe the child of a relative or friend...while she pours tea and serves bisquits. Your present to your girl would the gift of witnessing childhood charm.
I was surprised to find that the thought of a tea party held no appeal for the adults I talked to. Maybe that's because the Disney Princess people took over the idea. These days a lot of formal kid birthday parties are built around this Disney theme. I guess it's a chance for girls to wear the princess costumes they bought at Halloween. There's nothing wrong with that, but I prefer something on a smaller scale....
...something like this (above). These kids know how to celebrate.
How old should the kid host be? Maybe as young as this girl (above). Boy, she really has the tea party spirit. I like the small scale of the furniture and the tiny plastic tea sets. The chair should be so low that an adult sitting in it has his knees almost up around his chin.
Of course a tea party requires ritual. Maybe a little kid has to have witnessed an adult tea party in order understand the ceremony.
Kids have a limited attention span, and the tea party probably won't last long. Maybe you can stretch it out by baking scones with the kid, following her directions. Scones are fast and easy to make.
Maybe the thing to do is to build up expectation for the eventual arrival of...The Queen. Maybe the Queen is an adult who comes in amid much fanfare and agrees to take tea with everyone for a while. Here's (above) the way the Rennaisance Faire handles the Queen's entrance.
Happy Valentine's Day (early at least), Eddie. How are you liking The Hunger Games? Too bad I don't have as much money as I thought I would to buy all this stuff, but alas, as long as I get to read the whole first or second novels by the time the movie comes out, I won't care. It looks like a really easy read you can have done in a couple of days.
ReplyDeleteI work at a children's museum and I have tea parties ALL the time. But I don't know if they call them that anymore.
ReplyDeleteWe have toddler-sized tables and chairs, with little plates, cups, and silverware, along with puny pots and pans, all with fake food. They really enjoy giving you food, mostly in odd combination's; eggplants and scrambled eggs isn't my idea of a lunch. The really outgoing ones will prepare your food in the pots and pans. They will almost never sit down to have a conversation or pretend to sip tea like in the cartoons, they just keep handing you food as if they're trying to fatten you up. The more food they hand to you the happier they are. At the end of it I usually have about half (if not all) of the play food overflowing off of my plate. I'm thinking though that the main goal is to empty the bin of play food, because when the food bin is empty they look very accomplished thinking, "I did it, I gave all the food in the whole wide world."
Because of this and from other experiences I believe that people like to be 'involved'. so i would have the tea party in a buffet style. I would also make a lot of the food little finger foods, things you can just pick at and have a little of everything. You could even do something fun like decorating your own cupcakes. If you don't know how to cook, have her teach you she'll probably love that (you'll make her feel like an expert), just promise that you'll clean the mess.
Alberto: Haw! Sounds like good advice!
ReplyDeleteRoberto: I've only spot read in the book. I have two other books going so I have to finish them first.