Perhaps it was Dennis the Menace who first made a childhood obsession with pirates very popular. No wait... Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn loved to be swashbuckling pirates too. Whoever started the trend, children seem to just naturally go for the whole pirate craze. And what could be more fun to these children than a pirate birthday party theme? One could think of bringing in buried treasure, a colorful jungle bird piñata, party favors made of chocolates that resemble gold coins - your ideas are limited only by your imagination. But let's go to where all the action starts for a pirate birthday party - the pirate themed invitations.
One of the most popular kinds of pirate invitations, the treasure map invitation, can be a great mood setter. You can even make these on your own. You could start out with tan colored paper. You need paper that's colored this way to make it feel old. What will make it feel even older is if you are careful to burn the edges once you've made the invitations. If you can't find tan colored paper, you could pick up some regular paper and stain it on your own - with coffee grounds. You don't have to make every invitation exactly the same; they can be different from one to the other. Whatever you do, you need to make it look like one of those old pirate maps with bits of ocean, land, ships, you get the idea. The treasure that the map-cum-invitation leads to is your home for the birthday party, of course. That's where the X is supposed to be. But you can throw around little clues to where your houses, all over the map. You can even try using pirate vernacular. Actually, that's not optional.
Kids Toy Chest
So much for the treasure map invitation. How about an invitation that actually looks like a treasure chest? Yes, that could be a bit difficult. But if you are feeling particularly energetic, this could be the right idea for you. The idea is to make an invitation that opens to display its contents - all that you've written about when and where the party is. It'll take scissors, a spot of glue and a lot of patience. Start with a sheet of black paper, yellow paper to cut into circles to look like gold coins and paper of another color for all the writing. All you need to do is to fold the paper up to form a kind of four-edged pyramid to contain the gold coins. If you are feeling a little extra creative, you can even have a few gold coins coming out to give the appearance of a spilling treasure chest. The party information itself is on a piece of paper that you glue on the inside of the treasure chest. Once the lucky recipient gets past all the gold coins, they'll find this piece of paper inside telling them where the party is.