Hosting a party that’s fun for children and adults

This holiday season will be chock-full of parties – from work gatherings to family braais, to New Year’s Eve get-togethers and many of these will be a mix of both children and adults.

Here are some ideas from the Fourways Review team on how to make sure that people of all ages have a great time …

• Bake it off

Enlist the help of the children to make dessert. While the adults enjoy the main course, set up the children in the kitchen to help make something sweet – try and make it something that will use a lot of decorating, like icing cookies, so that the children have fun doing it! Then, the adults can enjoy nibbling on what their children enjoyed making.

• Holiday karaoke

If you can, rent a karaoke machine (plenty of companies offer them for hire at reasonable rates) and get everyone (young and old alike) to have a blast singing their favourite Christmas tunes! Even without the official machine, take some time to put on a ‘holiday concert’, because everyone loves belting out a verse of Jingle Bells, no matter their age.

• Play a game

Children play games, adults do grown-up things like talk about taxes – but there are exceptions to every rule! This holiday season, why not change it up a bit and let the adults take part in ‘children’s games’? If the weather is nice, bring all the guests outside for a ‘three-legged race’, ‘limbo’ or ‘potato-sack racing’! The kids will have a blast doing things with the big people, and the adults will get to blow off some steam and take part in the sort of things they don’t usually get to do.

• Thirty seconds

Create your own, family-friendly version of this classic game by choosing famous people and create your own cards with these items on them using everyday items (‘Circle’, ‘Oliver our pet cat’ etc) that young and the old will be able to guess. Then, divide into teams and take turns trying to guess everything on the list within the 30-second time window!