How to throw a Sustainable Birthday Party

It’s been a while since I last posted and we’ve been busy here on La Frattora Verdi! With our son just turning 11 years old we needed to do what every family does which is to plan a birthday party! Now, with our new lifestyle my husband looked at me and said “So just exactly what does this mean these days? Does this mean we frost a rice cake and throw it at the kid? Then there’s the question of what can we buy him? Do we have a family get together, a kid’s party? There are a lot of new dimensions to this thing with these new limitations honey.” I of course just laughed at him and he returned the laughter with a glare….apparently he didn’t find the humor in his statements as I had. Of course being “Green” doesn’t mean we have to frost a rice cake for the kid, or give him a hemp shirt and a wooden set of blocks for his birthday. He’s 11 years old for goodness sakes and this whole challenge isn’t about living on a commune. It’s about living locally and trying to make our carbon footprint on the planet smaller while making smarter choices both economically and environmentally. I felt this was the perfect time to bring everyone back to center, since I know there have been a lot of people basically watching over us asking us how we get “around” things, and “what about this and that…” to the point where we do feel like we have to watch everything we do to the letter. Then I told my husband we would be throwing a “Sustainable Birthday Party” for our son. That’s when he laughed back at me (oh now he finds humor!! Sure…when I say it, there’s something funny to laugh at. I get it.) He said “Ok, you let me know how we’re…I mean you’re gonna pull that one off, and I’ll go along with it.”

I didn’t think it was that hard to come up with a game plan. After all parents have been throwing birthday parties for their children since people have been having children! Actually that’s not really true…for centuries many people didn’t even really keep track of their birthday, or their birth year for the most part. It wasn’t until the 1700’s that people started to make celebrations of birth more of a social event and even at that it was typically a very small affair. If they would have only known what they started!!! Personally I’m good with going back to the old days when I wouldn’t have to record the slow march to my grave marked by the yearly passing’s etched into my face with wrinkles and into my hair with grey….I could be really good with that. Especially since the last Social Security letter I received assured me that I would be receiving the benefits that I’ve paid into the system just as soon as I retire, and announced my retirement date to be: DEATH. I thought “Yeah...looking forward to that birthday!”

Today, birthday parties are two fold I think. First they are celebrations held by the parents to show off to everyone else in the family and friends that yet another year has passed and as parents we’ve not beaten the child to death for the many events through out the year that warranted such beatings, or better yet we watched the child correctly and the child themselves were not the cause of their own mortal ending due to lack of parental supervision. Case in point: My son used to climb the walls for fun just to watch me have a heart attack, and he’s still alive because I just didn’t have the strength after self-administering the defibrillator to actually go and beat him to death myself, and that’s how he made it to the age of three! So, we threw a really big party that year  Secondly, they are thrown so kids can get “stuff”. Stuff they don’t need, stuff that will just lie around on the floor until mom cleans it up and stuff that will just end up donated to the Goodwill within a year’s time. Wow, bet you didn’t think birthday parties were such psychological events now did you?

For the purposes of throwing a truly sustainable birthday party I had to get down to the nitty gritty. First I threw out all party decorations, after all who needs those at the age of 11? We would however need food! My son is definitely a coinsurer when it comes to food, so I had to ask him what he thought we should serve and to keep in mind “The Challenge”. I was very impressed with our collaboration, so I will present to you below the menu for our event. After that we brain stormed on all the trash a party typically produces and tried to think of how to mitigate that issue. We had to decide on a guest list and ultimately a guideline for gifts because even though he stated that he didn’t want or need gifts we knew it would come up. My son is an only child and I am very blessed in the fact that he knows and is aware that he has everything he could possibly want, so when it came to this subject he said “I don’t need anything, so please ask them not to buy me any gifts. If they want to buy me something it’d be cool if they got me a gift card from one of their favorite local vendors, so that way I could go and try other peoples’ favorite places!”

Our son had decided he wanted to throw a party that mimicked the Italian “Agritorismo” where everything on the menu is produced on the farm, and it’s fresh and pure. I told him we couldn’t do that because we don’t have a “real” farm, so we decided on an old fashioned, down home southern feast typical of a summer picnic one would find in a small town. I agreed that would be the best bet and we would make sure that all the food was as fresh and unadulterated as possible! The menu was as follows:

BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwiches w/ Sweet Carolina Slaw
BBQ Chicken
Grilled Corn on the Cob (In the Husk)
Homemade Ice Cream
Sweet / Unsweet Tea

I created the invitations since buying them would create more waste, so I came up with a great theme (one you’ll find familiar I’m sure) and used the famous picture “American Gothic” which had been altered with a juicy slab of ribs atop the pitchfork and the woman wearing a bib  We asked only two things of our guests, which was to bring their own place settings in order that we could reduce the amount of trash that we’d have buy using disposable place ware, and to bring a side dish that was a favorite of theirs from picnics of their youth, so that we could all share in the memories. At the party we set out two bins (1 green and 1 blue) the green was for all things compostable, and the blue was for all things recyclable. We also had a trash bag available for the other unavoidable items. We served our drinks from “kegs” that my husband has for his homebrews, but for which we serve non-alcoholic beverages from. Before people left I had promised them for bringing their place ware I would have them washed to go in order to promote cleanliness, and everyone seemed to really enjoy that side benefit! For those who I knew might forget their place ware we did purchase some made from corn starch that will biodegrade in our compost within 6-8 months the manufacturer tells me. At the end of the evening it was very exciting to see that we had only ¼ of a regular kitchen trash bag of “trash” for a total of 15-20 guests. We had managed to recycle, or compost all of the remaining “trash” from the party. Well, with one caveat which was that once the children had eaten their corn from the cob I did let them in on a little secret….that my hens LOVE corn on the cob as much as they do. I let the children take the remainder of their cobs and throw them in to the run for the chickens to feast upon and that became instant entertainment as they all lined up outside the run and sat down to watch “Chicken Run” the live version.