Text 1: I have left the party bag race, by Joanna Firbank

An original contemporary newspaper column.

When did a six-year-old’s birthday party become a small music festival? Last month my son Leo was invited to eleven of them. One had a bouncy castle, a face painter and a man with a python. One was held at a trampoline park and ended with a cake shaped like a football stadium, floodlights included. One family hired an entire soft play centre, and a bored teenager in a polo shirt counted the children in and counted them out again, like sheep.

And then there are the party bags. When I was small, a party bag was a slice of cake wrapped in a paper napkin and, if you were lucky, a balloon. Leo came home last Saturday with a bag containing a torch, a water pistol, a book, a bath bomb and enough sweets to keep a dentist in business for a year. I was told, by another parent, that it had probably cost ten pounds. I was also told, in a slightly lower voice, what people had said about a family whose bags had cost less.

Nobody I know actually enjoys this. Parents are exhausted and overdrawn. Children are overexcited, sticky and, by the end, in tears. Yet we keep doing it, because nobody wants to be the first to stop.

So I stopped. For Leo’s sixth birthday, eight children came to our flat. We played pass the parcel, wrapped in old newspaper, and musical statues to a playlist I made in ten minutes. We made jam sandwiches. The cake was lopsided and the candles would not stay upright. Each child went home with a balloon and a slice of cake in a napkin.

It was, Leo told me at bedtime, the best party he had ever been to. I do not think he was being kind. I think, quite simply, that he had been allowed to play.

Text 2: A letter describing a juvenile party, by Emily Garnett

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1866, a woman describes to her sister a party given for children by a wealthy neighbour.

My dear Sophy, you will wish to hear about Mrs Haldane’s juvenile party, to which I took the girls on Thursday, and I will tell you, though I am not sure you will like it.

There were above a hundred children present, the eldest not thirteen, and the drawing rooms were hung with flowers and coloured lamps as if for a wedding. The little girls were dressed like their mothers, in silk and lace, with their hair in ringlets that must have cost their maids an afternoon, and they moved about very stiffly, as if afraid to spoil themselves. Our Bessie, in her white muslin, was quite the plainest child there, and I am glad of it.

There was a conjuror, who produced a rabbit from a gentleman’s hat, and a magic lantern, and a band of musicians, and dancing until eleven o’clock. The supper was a marvel: jellies, ices, sugared fruits, a great castle of cake with a flag upon it, and champagne cup, of which I saw one boy of nine take three glasses. By ten o’clock half the company was cross and the other half was sick. One small boy fell asleep under the supper table and was not found until the carriages were called.

I could not help thinking of our own parties at home, when we were small, with blind man’s buff in the kitchen and a cake our mother made, and how happy we were, and how nobody wept.

Bessie, when I asked her on the way home what she had liked best, considered for some time and then said that it was the dog in the hall, who had let her stroke him. I think there is a sermon in that, but I shall not preach it. Your loving sister, Emily.

Both of these texts are about parties for children.

Compare:

• what the writers say about children’s parties
• how the writers get across their views about these parties

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