Organising a Christmas Party in Aid of Charity

Last year my wife and I organised a children’s Christmas party for charity. It was my wife’s idea as she’d lost her mum to Cancer when she was a teenager, but also because our twins were born premature who meant they spent quite a bit of time in special care.

With this in mind we raised money for a cancer charity and for a premature baby charity. We’d never done anything like this before. I mean we’ve raised money for charity before, but have never actually put on an event.

Of course the first thing we needed to do was decide upon a date, then find an appropriate venue. We didn’t know how many people would turn up so choosing a venue was a tad on the difficult side, but these things often happen by chance!

My wife was at a play group and she mentioned that we would be organising the party. One of the women who ran the play group offered up the church hall free of charge and it seemed perfect. Not too big, not too small, quite modern and had it’s own kitchen.

Now that we had a date and a venue we needed some entertainment and of course we needed someone to be Santa. You can’t have a children’s Christmas party without Santa!

Originally my wife was thinking along the lines of a DJ, but that fell through so she decided to contact a number of local children’s entertainers and companies who hire out bouncy castles. With the party being funded entirely by ourselves, we wanted to do everything as cheaply as possible and so far so good with the free venue!

It was a few days in when my wife rang a company who hired out bouncy castles and they were very kind and generous as they allowed us to have a bouncy castle for free!

How amazing is that!

One of my wife’s friends sang in a band so she lent us her sound system and away we were!

The day finally arrived and my wife and I turned up at the church around an hour before the party was due to start. We’d sold a good number of tickets already and were also selling some on the door too.

Getting the room ready for the party was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. There were stackable chairs so we were able to use some of those around the edge of the room in case people wanted to sit down, but it also meant that the chairs we didn’t need were neatly tucked away.

Next up we laid out all of the party food which my wife and I made ourselves for a grand total of around £15! My wife had also bought some cheap party toys online so that she could do a lucky dip game for the children.

The party went really well and our girls loved it too!

Everyone appeared to have a good time and we most importantly we raised around £750 which was split between the two charities.

Considering my wife and I had no previous experience of organising an event like this, I think we did pretty well!