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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is this a new thing where it's expected to provide a meal for the guests, the siblings, and the parents?  I recall most parties I attended as a kid having cake and snacks.  Now if I were to do that is have to specify in the invitation?! Do I need to list what ingredients will be in what I'm serving as well do to allergy concerns?[/quote]

I guess it depends...I am 37 and do not recall attending a party or having a party where there was just cake and punch.  Yes, they were all home parties - but guests were always served food.  Granted it was hotdogs, burgers and chips, but you provided a meal.

You wouldn't have any other party anywhere for any other age group and not serve food at a meal time (I personally think food includes snacks, heavy apps, etc) - why do this at a kid's party?

And yes, if you had a party from 11-1 or 4-6 and had no intent of serving anything other than cake and juice/water, you should specify that.
[/quote]

I am 44 and until middle school, very few parties really had a meal, just cake and punch usually. If parents splurged, they got ice cream. Nothing was expensive. Cakes were almost always homemade, the punch from either a powdered mix or (and this was FANCY) a tub of frozen punch concentrate or sherbet that had ginger ale poured over it. The exception was sleepovers. And for those, parents did not serve two meals. You came after dinner in your pjs. There were simple snacks like a bowl of popcorn, chips, or pretzels and a single flavor of soda. Between 10:30 and midnight, the mom would breeze in with a small tray of some cheap, hot snack like pizza rolls or pigs in a blanket. The next morning, the mom served breakfast and it was acceptable for this to be cold sugar sweetened cereal, especially if it was Sunday and families were rushing to go home to shower, change, and make it to Mass. If it was Saturday and the mom liked cooking, she might make pancakes OR eggs, bacon, and toast.

Here is what sticks out in my mind because it was so novel:
--one girl had a real pizza. It was brought home by her dad from a pizzeria and had been "party cut" (sliced into many squares instead of 8-10 triangles). I didn't like crust as a child and was excited to have a center piece.
--a mother served us broiled grapefruit for breakfast. The whole family was on a diet. We each got a half a grapefruit and a pink packet of sweetener to sprinkle on top. I told her I was not allowed to have that sweetener. She said that I could not have anything else. Later, she relented and gave me a cup of BLACK coffee with a single sugar cube.

In middle school and high school, parties started when the sun went down and ended around 11. There was usually a buffet table and it did not have a huge variety of foods. Both homemade and carryout foods were acceptable. Even at my wealthy prep school, no one had a catered party unless it was a formal Sweet 16 at a banquet hall. Pizza and Kentucky Fried Chicken were popular. One boy had a six foot Italian sub and we were all impressed. Various types of chips and sodas completed the "meal". I remember that one party had either coleslaw or potato salad, both which I hated and none of the girls ate because we thought mayo would make us bloat and get pimples. Before the party ended, cake and punch made an appearance. Homemade cakes were less common then, but mainly because more guests were in attendance. Cakes tended to be simply decorated sheet cakes. If you were close with the birthday child, you got a piece with a rose. The name was never served, oddly. Sometimes, a parent would splurge for the cake that was half vanilla batter and half chocolate. Ice cream cakes from Baskin Robbins were acceptable, but little cups of ice cream or ice cream scooped from a tub were seen as childish. A few girls had cookie "cakes" made by a company at the mall and it was considered pretty sophisticated though the cookie was usually pretty bad and there was no neat way to slice it. If a girl had a sleepover, you didn't have any substantial food that night, just popcorn, chips, etc during the inevitable horror movie on VHS. Then, we went to McDonald's for breakfast the next day. A very cool mom would let you make cookies around midnight and we would eat the dough and get stomachaches. The coolest mom of all would save fortune cookies from her family's outings to Chinese restaurants and give us those. Most were terribly stale, but we loved them. Besides, we deeply believed that your fortune only came true if you ate your cookie  before reading the slip of paper.

In short, no goodie bags of candy or custom decorated cookies at the end. No food for parents or siblings. No personalized plates if you were a picky eater or allergic. As it turns out, I was the only kid I knew with food allergies and no one (including me or my parents) provided an alternative or took any precautions to label allergens or avoid cross contamination. I find that pretty scary actually, but it was the norm for the times.  Except for the broiled grapefruit incident, I never felt deprived by these meager offerings. We did not expect more. My parents never asked me after the party what was served or if I was still hungry. There was no shame for hosts in offering only cake and punch. We kids were all grateful for both as dessert and snacks in my community were less common back then than now.

Aside from avoiding allergens, I wish we would return to these simpler parties. Many families can not afford to feed even Subway to 30 kindergardeners, their parents, nannies, and assorted uninvited siblings.[/quote]

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