Happy Sunday, friends! Last week we hosted a double birthday party for our two younger sons. One of the kids missed having his party earlier in the year (due to Covid) and our other son will be celebrating his birthday very soon. With the threat of Covid still lingering, I really wanted to celebrate my sons’ birthdays with our family, but still remain cautious that we aren’t spreading germs. The weather turned out beautiful for our party, and I think overall it was a successful get together. Today I thought it might be helpful to share with you my tips for a successful socially-distant gathering.
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Host the party outside. We are lucky to have a large yard with room to spread out. I asked family to bring their own lawn chairs so everyone had a place to sit comfortably. These picnic blankets work great too for outdoor gatherings. They are easy to toss in the car and fold up nicely into a little bag.
Have hand sanitizer available. We set out a large pump bottle of hand sanitizer for people to use before we ate.
Plan to have one or 2 people serving the food. Less people touching the serving tools and food, the better. I explained to the kids that we will be serving them, and they won’t need to help themselves. This will help avoid the little fingers getting into the food!
Wrap utensils up individually. You can buy individually wrapped utensils, or you can wrap a knife and fork in a napkin for each person, and tie with a ribbon. I placed our utensils in a wicker basket meant for serving napkins and utensils. This way it was easy to just hand one set to each person, it was all ready to go.
Use plastic cups to serve food, like veggies. Have them all portioned out in disposable cups ahead of time, and cover with plastic wrap. You can even include dip in the bottom, if you’d like. This makes it easy to just hand everyone who wants veggies a their own cup.
Buy individual servings of chips, or make your own. I used small sandwich bags to make individual bags of chips to pass out.
Make sure you have lots of tongs on hand for serving. Tongs work great for serving hamburgers and buns, which is what we served at our party.
Serve cupcakes rather than birthday cake. We ended up serving both cake and cupcakes, but the cupcakes were much easier to distribute than slices of cake. You can use reusable silcone cupcake liners, or you can find really cute disposable cupcake liners! Plus you don’t need more utensils that way.
Have a cooler full of individual drinks. We served juice boxes for the kids and water bottles for the adults.
And that’s it! This is just what we did for our get together. I hope these tips are helpful if you are planning your own party. I’m sure some of you have other great ideas. I’d love for you to share them in the comments below!
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