How We Celebrate Plastic-Free Birthday Parties

It’s my daughter’s birthday week and we celebrated with our dear friends at home over the weekend. My family isn’t into big parties and we love to keep them low-key due to various reasons. Every year, we focus on:

• Finding joy in celebrating & creating memories over materialistic things

• Being kinder to the planet without purchasing more than what we need

• Looking beyond our wants, and giving back to those less fortunate than us

3 years ago, I wrote my first blog post on 10 Ways to Celebrate a Low Waste Kids’ Party and I’m so humbled that my family is on board with the idea of creating less waste even around celebrations. Birthday celebrations can bring in a lot of unnecessary clutter (unwanted gifts) and waste (wrapping paper, balloons & theme-based decorations, disposable cutlery).

I’ll share ideas in 5 main elements of a party and how to avoid all the plastic waste and clutter.

1. Invites

I’ve observed that my children and I love having smaller groups of people at home where we can share conversations more intimately while spending quality time with them. This year due to restrictions with social interactions, we could only invite 2 friends but that worked out well for us (I choose to look at the positive side of situations!). When planning your guest invites, get your children involved in planning who they’d like to invite. Some children get overwhelmed with too many people at home so dig deep and ask yourself ‘why’ you’re having a party and align your decisions accordingly.

Keep the actual invites simple too; a phone call or e-invite work great (instead of physical invites!)

2. Decor

When planning the decor, I prefer to avoid themed ones as my intention is to reuse the same ones every year (children tend to outgrow themes fairly quickly in my experience). A few years ago, I invested in a few neutral-coloured paper streamers, lanterns, wooden table confetti, and a wooden birthday ring to surround the birthday cake. The latter two we have are from Grimm’s wooden toys. We have not used balloons in a while and the children do not miss them one bit! This year, we also included fresh flowers as my mom who’s here with us loves them :)

The children are wearing costumes we’ve had for a while and one of them is preloved!

3. Food

For food planning, we respect the birthday child’s requests for favourite meals to make at home on their special day. We also try and use existing plates, cups and cutlery at home thus avoiding waste from single-use ones typically used during celebrations. Since baking cakes is not my specialty, we purchase these from our local bakeries. My mum and I enjoy the vegan & gluten-free chocolate cake from Roa Cakes while my children generally enjoy cupcakes so that they can choose their favourite flavours.

4. Games

No party is complete without games! My husband is the ‘fun’ parent in my family so he’s usually in charge of planning such things ;) He and I grew up watching a game show called ‘Minute to Win It’ where contestants took part in a series of 60-second challenges that used objects commonly available around the house. We played a sushi race (by placing two bowls at both ends of our hallway one of which had toy sushi pieces and the children had to transfer all the pieces between the bowls using chopsticks within a minute), bouncing a ball to land in a cup (as seen in the first picture below) and releasing 8 balls from a container strapped to the waist by moving the whole body ( I have a video recording of this and it was hilarious! We laughed so much while playing this game!)

5. Gifts

We usually prefer no gifts during birthday celebrations but if we had to choose, we pick experience-based gifts or preloved ones. We also try and avoid party favours (when my children were in kindergarten, they brought edible treats to share with their friends).

This year, our friends gifted my daughter a preloved card game and a handmade necklace (wrapped in reused packaging)! In the past, the grandparents have sent my children money, got them something from their wish list (Magnatiles, e-book readers, online courses, clothes, and books), and taken them to watch plays. For more low waste gift ideas, check out my previous blog post here.

In addition to the above, we discuss with our children which charity they’d like to donate to. Birthdays provide a wonderful opportunity for children to show their generosity while also giving them the power to willingly choose a cause they wish to support. By doing this, we are raising kind, respectful, and less entitled children.

Share with me below which idea you will try for your next birthday celebration! I’d love to read your ideas as well. Enjoy!