But at least we didn’t host the one where the cat savaged the magician’s rabbit
Source: Daily Mail >> Read full article and comment
By TOM UTLEY
Last updated at 10:52 AM on 21st May 2010
Children’s birthday parties have come a very long way since the fish paste sandwiches and musical bumps affairs I remember from my own childhood in the post-war austerity years of the Fifties.
According to a survey this week, there are many middle-class parents who reckon they have to budget for at least £500 to do justice to little Edward or Tabitha on the big day, while 90 per cent of today’s mothers say their children’s parties are too expensive.
I won’t pretend I’m surprised.
As the father of four boys, now well into their teens and 20s, I write with some authority, since I’ve financed and presided over 60 birthday parties for under-16s in my time, including 40 for under-11s.
And I can testify that the pressure to spend more on them has grown with every passing year since our first-born came into the world in 1985.
Until the boys started school, we made them settle for the kind of party we were given half a century ago, with all the old games and those penitential sandwiches that had to be eaten before we were allowed to tuck into the good stuff.
(To this day, I can’t look at a plateful of triangle-cut sandwiches without feeling a watchful adult’s sharp slap on the back of my five-year-old hand, caught stealing prematurely towards the chocolate fingers: ‘Tommy! You haven’t finished your lovely potted meat sandwich!’)
When I became a father myself, and a fully accredited member of the most indulgent generation of parents in British history, I relaxed the sandwich rule for my boys and their young guests.
I blush to admit that I also fell in with the modern wisdom that there should be no losers in the games, slipping a prize between every sheet of paper when I was put in charge of the wrapping for pass-the-parcel. But otherwise, those early parties for our boys might have come straight from a documentary on life in the Fifties. … Continue reading
