There's nothing like a party to warm your spirits on a cold day. Adrienne shares her daughter's: This was Bijou's first big birthday party (we have parties for ages 4 - 10 in our house). Because her birthday is in the middle of winter and we couldn't have her party outside, we decided to only invite friends her age (which turned out to be about 6 friends). I wanted to do something to embrace her winter birthday instead of being limited by it, so we had a Winter Wonderland themed party.

We are always on a super strict budget (we have 4 kids), so everything was either handmade or purchased at the dollar store. We didn't want her party to be "christmasy" although her birthday is VERY close to Christmas, so we just used snowflakes as decoration. Our older girls cut snowflakes from coffee filters to hang on the windows.

We made snowflake and snowman shaped shortbread cookies for the kids to decorate and mini snow globes for the kids to put in the goodie bags (which also contained handmade snowflake, star and heart shaped crayons and an owl or fox finger puppet). The snack were very simple - we had hot chocolate, popcorn, pretzel rods and of course birthday cake. Bijou had a blast.

Thanks Adrienne! Readers, you can find Adrienne at Four Bad Apples.