Help! My five-year old has decided that she wants her sixth (going on 30) birthday party to have a hawaiian theme. She told me she wants to wear coconuts and a grass skirt. I need to find ways to inexpensively decorate and still have the house, back yard and covered patio look like a tropical paradise. Does anyone know of recipes and games with a tropical flair. I'll have about 75 adults and kids there. I have a large, close extended family.
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Sandy, I read your message and thought I could help. Have you heard of the Oriental Trading Company? I just saw a bunch of neat things for a luau in their catalog on pages 86-90. They have pretty decent prices. Their web address is http://www.oriental.com. They also have a phone number 800-228-2269. Hope this helps! Sincerely,
Jody and Anita
Sandy, How about making leis out of plastic garbage bags. Bags come in all sorts of bright colours now, Just tie strips of plastic around wool thread, cording, string etc. Go to local travel agents and see if they have any posters of hawaii you could use for your party. Have pineapple pieces and coconut pieces in most of your food. Use the shells for dishes. Look around the house for anything that is brightly coloured and try and use it for decoration or as a serving dish piece.
Darlene
Here is a complete Tropical Theme Party plan... Hope you find it useful. www.creativepartyers.com/
Laurel Wolf greatparties@go.com www.1800partyconsultant.com/
I threw a Hawaiian party for my in-laws anniversary a few years ago. We bought ugly Hawaiian shirts at Goodwill and yard sales and provided them to the guests as they arrived. We also provided those cheap plastic leis for everyone to wear. I borrowed travel posters of tropical vacation spots from a travel agency for decoration, and had Don Ho and Elvis Presley Hawaiian records (you could borrow from the public library) playing for background music.
Suggestions to make it kid-oriented: Goldfish crackers; blue jello with gummy sharks.
Becki Harris Logansport, IN
Go to the local thrift stores and look for old straw hats, Hawaiian shirts, cheap sun glasses, or any loudly colored shirts/pants. Dress the birthday family in these. If you can get a lot of pairs of inexpensive sun glasses, give them out to guests to wear as they arrive. Or just tell the guests to make sure they bring a pair of sun glasses to wear!
To make a "grass skirt", you could use a strip of cloth or a small belt around the waist of the five year old, and then attach strips of raffia hanging down. A large package of raffia is about $2-$4 at a craft store, and you won't need all that much for a 5 year old. In a pinch, you could use green or brown yarn pieces to make the skirt, too. You could even use cut strips of the unwound tape from inside an old video cassette you no longer want. You may be able to get a real coconut from the grocery store, and cut it in half for the coconut top of the costume, but I think it might be hard to cut it perfectly into halves. Instead, you could cut off the bottoms of plastic pop bottles, or use small plastic bowls or containers, paint them brown and glue small pieces of raffia, cut up yarn, or straw over them to get that fuzzy coconut effect. Or even make paper mache coconuts (drape the paper mache over round balloons to get the shape).
For decorations, again, check the thrift store, or a local flea market, or rummage sale, etc., for any tropical-looking lights or decorations. Maybe you could use a strand of Christmas lights instead? It's bright and colorful, and that's all that matters!
Make your own decorations. You could make large "tropical" flowers out of gathered crepe paper, draw and color palm trees on cardboard, or make them out of construction paper. Maybe you could purchase some cheap silk/plastic loudly colored flowers at the dollar store, or a local party supply store (or check Oriental Trading Company on the internet).
Hang lots of brightly colored streamers and "flowers" all over the house or yard. You could even borrow some real tropical-looking plants from neighbors or family to add to your theme.
For drinks, the dollar store or the supermarket usually sells fluorescent straws, and you could cut chunks of pineapples to stick on the rim of the glasses.
Here are a few recipe ideas for the Hawaiian party. Will you be grilling outside? You could make some great grilled chicken with a marinade of pineapple juice and store bought barbecue sauce mixed (buy the cheapest brands). Or, if you want to bake chicken in the oven, brush the chicken with the same "sauce", but add some crushed pineapple on top of the chicken, and sprinkle a little paprika over it all, too. You could also bake a ham with pineapples and cherries on top of it (pour pineapple juice over top before baking; it's probably not Hawaiian, but it sure looks pretty), and slice it for sandwiches.
For appetizers, again, you could use pineapples. Buy some fresh pineapples, chunk them into bite-sized pieces, put a maraschino cherry on top of each piece, and poke a toothpick through each one. Perhaps you could buy some of the fancy, frilly-end toothpicks in bright colors to use. Or roll up a small piece of deli ham (or cut a chunk of your own baked ham) to go on the bottom of the toothpick along with these fruits. Make a colorful assorted fresh fruit platter, with a light fruit dip placed in a bowl in the center, and stick these fancy little "Hawaiian tidbits" among the regular fruit pieces. Maybe you can find more exotic fresh fruits to use, like mangoes or star fruit, to put on the platter. As long as it's colorful and eye-appealing, I think your guests will be delighted.
Serve Hawaiian Punch drink for the kids' beverages!
Bake a coconut cake for the birthday cake just shredded coconut sprinkled on top of any frosting looks pretty.
There are also many dessert recipes that use coconut and pineapple. Try www.allrecipes.com. They have a search engine that lets you look for recipes using specific ingredients.
Ask for help if need be sometimes family members are thrilled to lend a hand, and they may think of new things to add to your party. Also, ask others to help out with the cooking.
Call up a few relatives and ask if they would bring an appetizer or dessert, then tell them the theme, and see what they can come up with. They may also have great ideas to share with you to help out with the party theme.
These are just a few ideas, but should get you thinking. Most of all, have fun at your party! Do what's best and easiest for you. Enjoy!
Have fun! Let us know how it turned out!
Ness
I only have one suggestion, but it's really cute! You can easily make palm tree decorations to put in bowls of dip (or anything else with some substance to it for that matter.) Just take a green pepper with a nice even bottom and cut the top off in a spiky pattern (like kids always draw crowns, a bunch of interconnected "v"s.) Clean out the pepper and invert it over a carrot (the big end) and stick the tip into a potato or other fruit/veggie hidden in the bottom of your bowl of dip. Viola - a tropical palm tree!
Jennifer Loveless
You can cut a pineapple in half lengthwise and cut out the "meat" of the pineapple into chunks and place them back into the "bowl" of pineapple and place one at one end of the table and one at the other. Another idea for a fun thing to do at the party is to have everyone bring a pineapple and make pineapple drinking glasses. Or at least add that whoever would like to, we will have a table set up for you to make your own pineapple glasses if you want. Maybe have cups with drink umbrellas, maraschino cherries and straws and have an adult supervise the table to cut the pineapples in half.
You could make your own decorations with construction paper or tissue paper. Cut out brown or yellow paper in the shape of a pineapple, draw criss cross lines (making diamond shapes) across them and place one single dot in the center of each one (or even without the dot it will be obvious what it is) you can even go a step further and do the bottom of the pineapple in one color and the top in another and glue together.
Instead of the traditional goodie bags, you can buy inexpensive thongs for $1-2 at Walmart and those kiddie sunglasses like ten for a dollar or two and those plastic leis and hand those out as the goodie prizes. Adults won't expect goodie bags, so you can just give them leis or hand each person a Hawaiian style flower cut out of paper to pin on their shirt and have one that is different than all others and make that the one to win the door prize. OR do the limbo game and let the winner get the door prize.
Decorations for the table can be a make-shift hog spit. If you have a small stuffed pig you could make a pretend spit and use red, yellow and brown tissue paper to make a "fire" under it and get small stones to place in a circle around it. Or you could just lay it on a platter and place plastic or real fruit around it. The Hawaiian Natives are proud of their bananna leaf roasted pigs.
For a cake you could buy her a Hawaiian Barbie or just one that looks Hawaiian and make a grass skirt from raffia ribbon to wear with her bikini top. Bake the cake and before you ice it, place the Barbie on a doll stand and squish stand down into cake. This will hold the base down. Raise the metal bar up so that Barbie is standing on the cake. Decorate the cake with tan icing to look like sand. You could even sprinkle sugar or colored sugar on top to give a sand effect. You can buy tiny starfish and sand dollars in the craft store. They have been bleached so you could probably safely use it on the cake if it isn't left on too long. Or you could cut pieces of paper or cardboard to set them on hidden under each one. Or you could use icing tips and make shells and seastars with. And buy a boquet of silk flowers to put around the edge of the cake and one bigger one up on the top. If you didn't have a doll stand, you could sit Barbie down on the cake as though she is sunbathing.
hey hey you could play limbo and have this string and thread it through strawberries and go under it and they have to eat a strawberry and if they don't they are out of the game.
I'm Scarlet and I'm celebrating my 11th birthday. I need some ideas for it for decorations that are simple and made with stuff laying around the house because we don't have much money. This birthday is special. This is the first birthday I've got to have friends over, and the birthday before I go to 6th grade, I just finished 5th.
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hi im throwing my little sisters b-day party shes turning 7 and wants a hawaiian party but my mom is low on money and we don't know what to do help!
Go to http://www.orientaltrading.com I just bought tons of Hawaiian accessories to go with my party even the loot bags and hardly spent anything.
The oriental trading post is great but if you are from Canada don't even look because it will just make you sad. You have to add exchange at least $20 shipping, duty, tax, and a foreign exchange fee.
My daughter recently had a hawaiian party when she turned 9. We went to a carpet warehouse and got some cardboard rolls that carpet comes on. Then we just attached some big construction paper leaves for quick and easy palm trees. We got leis from a discount store for 40 cents apiece and make big flowers from tissue paper. The girls wore swimsuits and they laid out on beach towels in the living room. We also hung up Christmas lights and taped silk flowers to the string on lights. It was a big hit!!
Erin
How about coconut bowling, and the obvious, but unmentioned, hula hoop contest( Dollar Tree has children's size hoops)
My five-year old has decided that she wants her sixth (going on 30) birthday party to have a hawaiian theme. She told me she wants to wear coconuts and a grass skirt. I need to find ways to inexpensively decorate and still have the house, back yard and covered patio look like a tropical paradise. Does anyone know of recipes and games with a tropical flair. I'll have about 75 adults and kids there. I have a large, close extended family.
Sandy
Editor's Note: This requested was submitted back in 2000. We are working on entering older information.
My sweet 16 is only a couple of weeks away and I am having a Hawaiian themed birthday and I cannot figure out what fast and easy snack recipes and any games to Play so my party won't be a downer. Does anyone have any Ideas???
Hi! I need help bad! I'm having a party.The theme is Hawaii. I'm having eight girls over. I need some ideas for decorations, games and food
love
lora
DATE:9/3/06
Hello. I am throwing a Hawaiian Pool Party/Sleepover for my friends. My friend is doing the same thing so we planned it together. We came up with awesome but complex things. We came up with Paper Mache Volcanos with dry ice, fire pit and getting custom made tees. Got any other ideas for 13 year olds? Thanks.
My birthday is coming up and ive invited 12 gurlz over the theme is hawaii i live in UAE and i have no idea what to do or what to design or the games or anything plllz help me !
Dana 12 years old uae
Where can I buy cheap accessories and decorations for a Hawaiian beach party. I'm 23yrs living in Dubai. Any stores around here?
Thanks
I'm having a surprise party for my best friend and I want her to love it the theme is hawaiian. I need game ideas cake ideas craft ideas and decoration ideas.
Please help.
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