Don’t ask me why, but we decided to do our youngest daughter’s baptism and our older daughters second birthday party all on the same day.  Call us crazy, but it sounded like a good idea at the time.  We are still in the party at home stage (thank the lord!), but we wanted to do it in a low-key “green” way.  While I consider myself an environmentally friendly person, I wasn’t sure where to start while planning a celebration for the kids.

Then I ran across “Celebrate Green”, a book dedicated to the idea of celebrating life’s events in a “green” way.  Corey Colwell-Lipson and Lynn Colwell, the authors of Celebrate Green, were able to lay out a number of ideas that were easy to implement and didn’t break the budget.

The book is full of different ideas that you can use for any celebration.  They had some great ideas for creating a birthday party that “gives back”, but it was a little to late for us to implement them specifically, but I’ll be saving some for next year!  I am especially excited to have everyone bring canned goods (each person is asked to bring canned goods in the amount of the birthday childs’ age) and donate them to the food pantry in town.  What a great way to teach kids about charity and to have everyone feel good about going to another birthday party!

We were able to include ideas from other types of celebrations in the book.  We used a christening gown that had been used for my mother and her 3 brothers and sisters, my brothers and my nephew.  We loved the fact that it had family history to it and we did not have to buy a new gown!  We had the kids do physical games, we borrowed potato sacks and leg ties and did “old-school” sack and 3-legged races!  It was a blast.  We also borrowed (recycled) a moon bounce from one of our friends and the kids spent most of the day in that.  I didn’t want to go out and buy a bunch of toys that would end up getting lost or broken, so instead I made cookie lollipops and gave them to everyone as favors!  They were a little time consuming to bake, ice and wrap, but in the end they were personalized and they were edible (reducing waste!).

Now that the party is over, I can safely say that it was a success.   Next time we’ll be even “greener” and that is a good thing.  I can’t wait to try out some of the ideas they have for having a “green” Valentine’s Day!   But I’ll keep that for another day!

Tags: baptism, birthday, green, party

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 4:26 am and is filed under Parents Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.