Alice in Wonderland party ideas

Plan your very own Mad Hatter Tea Party with your friends! Celebrating your Unbirthday, Or are you having a croquet game in your backyard?

Party invitations:

* Have your invitations come from the Fish-Footman, addressed to `For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.'
* Tell your guests not to be late for a very important date, like the White Rabbit
* Ask them to meet you in Wonderland
* Put a teabag, playing cards, or other stuff together with the invitation into the envelope

Decorations:

* Set up a long table, covered with all different kinds of teapots, mismatched teacups and saucers, chandeliers, etc. Have an assortment of 'odd' chairs around the table, so that people have to sit at different heights. Use a colorful tablecloth.
* Hide a stuffed toy representing the Dormouse in one of the teapots.
* Hang colorful paper lanterns above the table
* Decorate your door so it represents the rabbit hole, or the looking glass, where people have to go through to enter the party. Or use a play tunnel.
* Hang up signs with 'this way', 'that way', 'up', 'down', etc. painted on them, like in Disney's Tulgey wood.
* Put some clocks in the room that are stopped at tea-time.
* Decorate the walls with playing cards (normal size or really huge ones from cardboard), and the floor with a chessboard-like pattern. Scatter around some chess pieces.
* Hang a branch to the ceiling with a Cheshire Cat (or just it's grin) in it.
* Use lawn flamingos
* If you have a fireplace, put a large mirror on the mantelpiece. Or attach one to a door so people can actually go through the looking glass. If you don't have a huge mirror, create one with aluminium foil
* Make rabbit paw tracks and put them on the floor, leading in various paths through your house and/or garden
* Put up a children's swimming pool to represent the pool of tears
* Make vulture heads and paste them on top of some umbrella's. Hang the opened umbrella's from the ceiling
* Buy rose bushes at a garden store and decorate them with white and red roses
* Stuff a big Alice-like doll into a small doll-house
* Fill vases with white and red roses, and hide one or several brushes with red paint in them


Games:

* Play lawn croquet: with hedgehog plush toys as balls, or perhaps hedgehogs painted on the balls. Attach colored and stuffed socks to the end of the mallets and sew on eyes, to represent flamingos. Create large cardboard playing cards for the arches.
* Play chess. You can do this on a normal sized chessboard, or you can make a huge chessboard in your garden and have your guests play the pieces!
* Play "pin the grin on the Cheshire Cat"
* Turn on the TV and play Alice movies during the party.
* Paint eggs so they resemble Humpty Dumpty. Or buy white tea pots and tea cups, and paint them yourself.
* Do the Caucus race. Make your guests run around in a circle, and when you shout 'stop' the last one to sit down/run to the middle is out. Or make a caucus version of the game musical chairs, where you remove one of the chairs each round and people have to find a chair to sit on when the music (the caucus race song from the Disney movie) stops.
* Make up silly riddles
* Play 'Paint the roses red'. Buy some fabric white roses and red paint (or markers). The person (or team) who finishes painting his rose first wins. You could give time penalties for sloppy painting or spilled drops. You could also set a general time limit and have someone dressed as the Queen of Hearts storm into the room when the time is up.
* Buy some basic hats and let your guests decorate them
* Hide a small golden key or a White Rabbit plush and have your guests find it
* Do a quiz with trivia questions based on the Alice stories
* Play games with a 'Contrariwise' theme: make people name stickers, where you write their names on backwards. Everyone must call everyone else by their backwards name, or risk a forfeit. You could invent a game where names must be called, or you could just have this going on throughout the party. Also, you could ask people questions and they must give the opposite answer. Or, say the answer, but backwards. For most of these games, some kind of time pressure is essential to make it more difficult and to make people make mistakes and have to do forfeits. The more adult the party, the more adult the questions. 'Have you ever done xyz?' would be interesting if people have to say the opposite. It becomes more like a truth or dare game then.
* Make a game of Clean Cup: have guests assemble at table. They fill their plates with food and make their tea (or other drink) as they like for a certain amount of time. When the time is over, say "Clean cup. Clean cup. Move down. Move down." The guests move to the next place and put more food on the plate and change the tea however they wish. This goes on and on until everyone returns to their own place setting. Now, everyone must eat and drink what the others have put. Prizes can be awarded to the most weird concoction.
* Make coloring pages for children so they can paint the roses red
* Make teams, put a bucket (or large teapot) with tea on one side and an empty one on the other side of a course. Your guests have to fill a teacup, run to the other side (with the cup in their hands, or balancing them on their heads...), and empty the cup there. The team that has filled the bucket first wins.
* Have an "I'm late!" potato sack race, in which everyone has to hop to the finish like the White Rabbit.
* Gather a lot of teacups and put them upside down on a table. Under one of them, you hide a Dormouse (or White Rabbit). Your guests take turns and may lift one cup per turn to see whether something is underneath it. The one who finds the Dormouse wins. You can make the game harder by inventing extra rules, like shuffling the cups after each turn.
* Get a hookah and attach a bubble blower to the end (or create one by bending a wire), so you can blow soap bubbles. Who makes the largest?
* Dance the Lobster Quadrille
* And of course, don't forget: EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes!

Costumes:

* Of course you and your guest all dress up as Wonderland characters!
* Have your guests wear top-hats or rabbit ears.

ood & drinks:

* Attach labels with the words 'eat me' and 'drink me' to all kinds of things, like the sugar bowl and bottles.
* Bake little cupcakes with the words 'eat me' written on them in icing
* Bake cookies in the shape of the letters EAT ME, and/or hearts, clubs, diamond and spades.
* Serve lots of (ice)tea, edible mushrooms, pepper soup or Mock Turtle soup, oysters, plum-pudding and a leg of mutton.
* Glue the lid on a jar of jam, so nobody is able to open it. You know, the rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam to-day...
* Make a cake in the shape of a mushroom or teapot. Or a three-tiered cake like in the Disney movie.
* From a loaf of bread you can create bread-and-butterflies
* Order (or create) some custom made tea bags or tea favors for your guests
Music:

* Soundtracks from movies, like Disney's
* 'White Rabbit' from Jefferson Airplane
* 'I am the Walrus' from the Beatles
* 'Looking Glass' from Hypnogaja
* 'Through The Looking Glass' from Symphony X
* Grease-paint children as rabbits, or cats, or other Wonderland characters.