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It’s Party Time Tuesday!
One party theme that you can never go wrong with is a Pirates theme! Especially with the popularity of Pirates of the Caribbean; everyone loves a good pirate party. After I did this party for my son, my daughter was requesting a pirate party. I didn’t think that repeating the same party theme the following month would make much sense, but I was glad that the party was a hit.
Costumes
Okay, the first thing you need to make a good pirate party, is pirates! Invite your guests to come dressed in their favorite pirate attire. It’s so easy to put together a costume; you can really use anything in your closet to make it work and the Dollar Tree always has options. Both boys had dressed up as pirates for Halloween in the year’s before, so we got some extra use out of those. For Aubrey, we just put her in a white shirt and her red Christmas skirt I’d made her. I took some extra red fabric and cut a rectangle and wrapped it around her head for a bandana.
Are these not the cutest pirates you’ve ever seen? I love these pictures, especially Aubrey’s expression in the second picture!
Decorations
I mostly just decorated the inside table where I laid out all of the food and goodie bags. I always use my food as part of the décor; it just makes sense! You’re gonna spend the money on the food anyway; may as well kill two birds with one stone. Jake and the Neverland Pirates was very popular at that time (and Cody loved that show), so I used that for our tablecloth and decorated with plastic pirate coins and necklaces. I put extra coins and necklaces in the goodie bags for the kids. I found a wooden chest at Michael’s that made the perfect pirate’s chest, so I painted that and put the “loot” (party bags) inside. After the party, Cody got to keep the chest for his own loot!
Food
A party isn’t complete without food. I set out sandwiches and along with it, I also put out shark bait (gummy sharks), cannon balls (cheese balls) and fool’s gold (butterscotch candies). I was too cheap to buy any printables from Etsy so I made my own food tags. I printed out the words and pirate skulls and glued them on black construction paper. I cut out red lines from red construction paper and glued them across. Super easy and super cheap. I also made blue jello cups to mimic the ocean and cut orange wedges to look like pirate ships. Again, I printed the “flag” from an image in my print shop and glued them on toothpicks. We also had an inflatable pirate chest cooler (not pictured) for all of the drinks that was pretty neat!
Cake
I was very happy with how my cake turned out! I only wish I’d gotten a better picture of it. This was before my days of blogging, so I wasn’t as thorough with my photography. I think you can mostly get the idea. I took 2 round cakes and stacked them on top of each other, carving out the middle section to look like the deck of a pirate ship. I frosted the deck yellow and the ship brown. I used large pretzel rods for the masts and printed out my own flags. You can pretty much see what I did for the rest. I was able to find the Jack Sparrow figurine at the Disney store, since a new movie had just come out. They probably aren’t as easy to find now, but I’ve linked them at the end of this post.
Activities
Some friends of ours owned a bounce house at the time, so it seemed only logical to set that up. I had a couple other activities set up to entertain the kids during the party. One requires parent supervision. We filled up balloons with little prizes and attached them to a sturdy board. The kids threw darts at the balloons and got to keep the prize from whichever balloon they popped. Like I said, this activity was very well organized so that no injuries occurred, and it worked out perfectly fine. In fact, it was a huge hit!!
I also found plain white “treasure boxes” online and bought gel paints, sequins, jewels, etc for the kids to decorate their boxes. They spent quite a bit of time at this station!
Music
I bought a pirate party song CD that was a huge hit. It definitely set the pirate mood for the party, but I’m not sure if this was my best idea ever. Seven years later and my boys still play this CD on repeat!! (particularly my almost-8-year-old). Some nights I go to bed singing “Yo Ho Ho, with a bottle of rum!”
I feel like there was a lot more that I could’ve done, but at the end of the day I’ve found that you really don’t have to go overboard (no pun intended) to put on a good party. With just a couple of activities, the costumes and the food, this party was a hit!
Here’s where you can find pirate loot:
