How To Host A Winter-Themed Sleepover Party

Come in out of the cold and celebrate winter in the comfort of your own home with a winter-themed sleepover! Whether you're all heading indoors after hours of playing in the snow, or you're tired of all that winter weather and feel like hibernating, everyone will enjoy a winter-themed indoor slumber party.

The best sleepovers all have the same ingredients.

• Decorations
• Activities
• Lots of food

Read on to plan the perfect overnight that will help you get over your winter blues.

Decorations

Set the scene with winter-themed decorations. You can do this ahead of time or make decorating for the party with your friends your first activity. 

• Decorate your walkway with sidewalk chalk drawings of snowflakes and messages to welcome your guests.
• Hang strings of white holiday lights indoors in your party room.  
• Hang paper snowflakes from the ceiling by tying one end of a piece of  white thread to the snowflake and taping the other end to the ceiling using tape that won’t ruin the paint and is easy to remove.
• Using Halloween spider web decorations, cotton batting and stuffing from a craft store, or christmas tree skirt snow, create piles of white cotton around the party space to look like snow. 
• Make icicles out of white crepe paper or scrap paper and hang them from the tops of the  doorframes.
• Decorate your party table with a white or blue disposable tablecloth or a white craft paper roll. Use a hole-punch to punch out white and blue circles and sprinkle them like confetti across the table. If your tablecloth is made of paper, set out blue, white, and silver markers for doodling.

Feeding your guests

A sleepover party usually lasts from dinner through to breakfast the next morning, and includes snacks to fuel your fun, too. You can even set up a midnight (or super late night) buffet!

Winter-Themed Snack Ideas

• Bowls of silver, blue, and white candies like M&Ms, jellybeans, winter Hershey’s Kisses, Snow Cap chocolate candies, blue and white rock candy, white yogurt covered pretzels, and popcorn.
• Cut up carrots (or, as we like to think of them, snowman noses) and dip them in (snow-colored) ranch dressing.
• Blue corn chips in queso blanco (white cheese) dip.
• Make blue and white popcorn using this pink popcorn recipe.

Sample Dinner Ideas

Pizza, chicken fingers, subs, and mac and cheese are the standard dinner items for a reason -- they’re real crowd-pleasers. If you want to try something different, try these options:

• Taco bar
• Meatballs and Spaghetti
• Beef Stew

 

Have a Midnight Dessert Buffet

A late-night dessert buffet is a sure-fire crowd-pleaser, and it’s easy to set up, too. Set out bowls and napkins and invite your guests to customize their own late-night desserts

• Customize a hot cocoa mug, then set up a hot cocoa bar so you can each customize your own perfect sweet drink.
• Banana split bar.
• A popcorn mix bar that includes big bowls for popcorn and mix-ins like grated cheese, chocolate chips, m&m candies, gummy bears, and mini-marshmallows
• Cupcake fondue (dip mini cupcakes into pre-made frosting, sprinkles, colored sugar, and tiny candies like nonpareils). 
• Set up a mini pie bar.

Breakfast for a Crowd

No matter how much you eat the night before, everyone will wake up hungry. Here are some fun and easy wintry breakfast ideas to feed your friends.

• Easy overnight french toast
• Heart-shaped pancakes
• Eggs in muffin tins
• No-cook energy-boosting breakfasts
• Set out mini boxes of your friends’ favorite cereals for a simple yet satisfying breakfast

Or try this simple recipe for a refreshing, healthful cold blast of fruity flavor.

White-as-snow breakfast smoothies

• In a blender, combine 1 cup milk or non-dairy milk substitute, 1 frozen banana, and ½ teaspoon sugar or honey.
• Blend until smooth.
• Pour mixture into a clear glass. Makes one serving. 

TIP: To make a batch of smoothies for all your guests, multiply each ingredient by the number of guests you’ll have -- and don’t forget to include yourself! If you’re having 3 friends over, you would need 4 cups of milk, 4 frozen bananas and 2 teaspoons of sugar.

Party Activities

The best part of sleepovers is the unlimited time you have to spend together talking, laughing, doing crafts, playing video games and board games, and just hanging out, but it also helps to have fun activities on hand, especially if you’re putting a winter spin on your evening of fun. 

• Let it Glow: It gets dark pretty early during winter, but you can light up the night with glow-in-the-dark fun. The craft store dollar bins and dollar stores as well as party supply stores are great places to hunt for glow sticks, glow jewelry, and even glow glasses. Get your glow on, then turn out the lights, turn on the music, and have a glow-in-the-dark dance party
• Play spin the bottle -- with nail polish colors! You’ll need a repurposed board game spinner and up to 10 colors of nail polish. Take turns spinning the spinner. When it lands on a color, use it to polish one nail. The game is over when all ten nails are polished on each party guest. 
• Set up an indoor tent and have an indoor camp-in instead of a camp-out
• Play a winter-themed would you rather game. Write the questions ahead of time or have each of your guests write a bunch on slips of paper and place them in a jar. Would you rather meet a moose or a bear in the woods? If you were stranded in a winter wonderland, would you rather go ice fishing or hunting to survive? What other winter would you rather questions can you think of?
• Play snow-themed games from the warmth and comfort of your living room. Like turning your bestie into a snowman using toilet paper. Give each duo a roll of toilet paper and choose which of you is going to be the snow-person. Race to see which team can unroll the entire TP roll around their snow person first.
• Craft white and blue sugar scrub or bath bombs (you can substitute baking powder for the cornstarch so it fizzes)
• Make a Frozen or winter-themed scavenger hunt. Place winter-themed items around your party space and challenge your friends to collect as many of them as they can in their pillowcases. You can use items like: wintry stuffed animals ie: polar bear, penguin, moose, snowman stuffie, etc.; snowman-themed items like a carrot, scarf, broom, or hat; things that look like snow, like pom poms; Frozen toys from little siblings or from when you were little. Here’s the fun part: your guests can also bring back items you hadn’t intended for the hunt as long as they can defend why it fits the theme.

Pop til you drop

Before the party, write down one activity per hour on a piece of paper, roll it up, and place each activity idea inside a different balloon. Blow up each balloon and label it with the hour it represents. Just before each hour strikes at your party, do a New Years Eve-style countdown, then pop the corresponding balloon to discover the next activity.
Some sample activities:

• 7pm - Have a glowing dance party!
• 8pm - Play nail polish spin the bottle
• 9pm - Play would you rather
• 10pm - It’s Tik Tok O’Clock 
• 11pm - Play snow-themed games
• 12pm - Midnight buffet 

Share With Kidzworld

Do you have fun slumber party ideas that fit a winter theme? Which ideas from this article are you excited to try? Share them in the comments below.