My youngest daughter turned four this week, and she requested a Frozen birthday party. Her birthday fell on Thanksgiving Day, which meant we kind of had to have her party on the same day. How do you explain to a four-year-old that we have to celebrate something else on her birthday?

Because of stupid Covid, we couldn’t have lots of people over as we usually do, and let me tell you, the internal struggle that that amounted to was absolute torture. We ended up having just my parents and one of my sisters and her family. I could write a whole post on how devastating it is for a party planner to not host a full party AND have to leave out so many family and friends. But instead of wallowing in the injustices of Covid, let’s instead move on to the successes of this DIY Frozen Birthday Party.

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Frozen Invitations:

Let’s be serious, I just called up my Mum and sister and said, “By the way, while you’re here for Thanksgiving, can we have a birthday party?” Total bummer.

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Frozen Decorations:

Coffee Filter Snowflakes:

This was the main backdrop of our party. My son, the birthday girl and I made the blue and white snowflakes. They’re just coffee filters dyed with blue food colouring and then cut out into snowflake shapes. I cut them using the classic fold-them-in-half-and-then-half-again-and-then-half-again-then-cut-out-triangles-etc method. Then I taped them to fishing line and then to the wall. We originally had them hanging in the dining room for the morning when she woke up, and that looked amazing, but I didn’t get a picture. I made 28 of them, which took a long time, but I did it around a campfire while chatting with my children, so it was actually quite lovely.

Giant Snowflakes:

(Pictured above) These are made out of six pieces of computer paper each. They’re super easy. I made them using this tutorial, then I strung them up with fishing line as well.

Balloons:

I took the birthday girl shopping, which you shouldn’t do if you want your party to be perfectly coordinated, but you should do if you want the birthday girl’s interests to win out. I told her that white and blue balloons would work best for a Frozen party, but she insisted that she wanted pink balloons, so pink balloons it was! I think they compliment quite nicely.

Hand-Cleaning Station:

We also had a nice hand cleaning station as a nod to coronavirus. I placed a mirrored tray with an Elsa doll, a chalkboard (DIY tutorial here) with “Happy Birthday” (actually, it says “Hape Brthda”- cute) and a bottle of hand sanitizer.

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Frozen Games:

Frozen Scavenger Hunt:

We played two games at this Frozen Birthday Party. The first was a Frozen Scavenger Hunt. I found the free printable for it on My Sister’s Suitcase. It’s designed for indoors, but we made all but about three of the clues work for outdoors; those indoor clues we just left out. The final clue (that I added because it was too tricky to find a good spot to hide the prize when they were playing outside for so long beforehand) was “You did it! Now go see Mummy/Auntie Jessica for your prize!” And this was their prize, a bag full of:

Each child got a baggie with hot chocolate powder and funky marshmallows, two snowball gumballs and a cookie on a stick that I had dipped in icing (you can find my icing recipe here). Don’t use store-bought tubs of icing for this snack because they won’t harden. My icing is much better, because it will harden, making it easy to put in a bag.

Thaw the Frozen Heart

This second game I made up myself😏. I call it, “Thaw the Frozen Heart.” Here are the steps for the set up:

• half fill a Ziploc bag with water and freeze it You can leave the bag unzipped
• add a small wooden craft heart and fill the bag with water
• zip up the bags and freeze them upside-down, suspended between other freezer food. Make sure the heart floats up to the section that is already ice, leaving the heart in the middle of the bag instead of at a side. This ensures that the heart is in the middle of the ice.
• Freeze these at lease 24 hours before the party.

The goal of the game is to get the heart out of the ice by smashing the ice with a hammer (like the men at the beginning of Frozen do). We had two children go at a time and race. You could time each set to see who does it the fastest, then give them a prize, which was my intention. But in reality the kids didn’t care, and didn’t want to wait to time it. The prize was a package of gummy icebergs, so we just divided them among the group. The kids really loved this game, and it was fun for us adults to watch. Tip: Play “Frozen Heart” from the soundtrack while you play!

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Frozen Food:

Three Frozen things here: The Cake, Ice Blocks and some C-Plus that I dyed blue with food colouring. We used one cube of Jello to hold the four candles, so my daughter wouldn’t, when blowing out her candles, spit on the whole cake thus making it Coronavirused and consequently null and void. Instead all her little four-year-old spit just landed on her own cube of Jello.

Kristoff’s Ice Blocks:

These Jello cubes are, obviously😉, bricks of ice. I used this recipe: Knox Blocks. Super quick, super delicious.

DIY Frozen Cake:

This DIY Frozen round cake was a team effort. The birthday girl and I made it, I iced it, and my Mum made the decorative cake toppers. I iced the cake with a tub of ready-made icing. I put into into a separate bowl and mixed in a couple drops of blue food colouring. Then, after icing the cake blue, I watered down some of the white coloured icing (which I left in the tub) and scooped it with a small spoon to drizzle the white icing along the edges to make it look like icicles and snow. To finish off the look we sprinkled the top blue icing with white sprinkles. These sprinkles were actually little teddy bears, so we crushed them with a rolling pin so they’d look like snow instead.

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I honestly had my doubts about this party. There seemed to be so many sad things about it (like a serious lack of family and friends, and the high probability of inclement weather) that I had a hard time motivating myself to plan it. But it ended up being really nice, with great weather. My son, after the party, was heard to say, “This is the best day ever!” The birthday girl loved it, too, and really, what more could I ask for?