Alice in Wonderland party ideas
Are you planning your very own Mad Hatter Tea Party with your friends? Celebrating your Unbirthday? Are you having a croquet game in your backyard? Or organizing an Alice in ONEderland party for your child? On this page you can find many ideas about how to decorate your Alice in Wonderland party, what to eat and drink, and what games to play with your guests.
These tips are also great for a Sweet Sixteen birthday, Quinceañera, baby shower, or other parties. Are you planning a wedding? Check out my Alice in Wonderland wedding ideas as well!
Party invitations
- Have your invitations come from the Fish-Footman, addressed to ‘For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.’
- Tell your guests not to be late for a very important date, like the White Rabbit
- Ask them to meet you in Wonderland
- Use some famous quotes from the books, like “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here (…)” for directions, and “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty (…)” for the start of the invitation
- Put a teabag, playing cards, or other stuff together with the invitation into the envelope
- Shape your invitations like a playing card, tea bag, teapot or tea cup. Or make a top hat, and replace the 10/6 card with a card containing the party details.
- Attach a tiny golden key to the invitation card.
Decorations
- Set up a long table, covered with all different kinds of teapots, mismatched teacups and saucers, chandeliers, etc. Combine normal sized teacups with some huge ones, and some tiny ones as well (like a dollhouse sized tea set). Use a colorful or checkered tablecloth. Have an assortment of ‘odd’ chairs around the table, so that people have to sit at different heights. Place a large armchair at the head of the table, for the main guest.
- Stack teacups and saucers and glue them together to create a tiered teacup cake stand.
- Put up several colorful patio umbrellas or beach umbrellas. Decorate them with dots on the outside and/or pieces of crepe paper / cloth on the inside, so they resemble mushrooms. Set them on different heights and tilt some of them.
Hang colorful paper lanterns on the ceiling or on strings you tie between trees and bushes.- Hide a plush animal representing the Dormouse in one of the teapots.
- Scatter Alice in Wonderland related items across the table, like little golden keys.
- Decorate your door so it represents the rabbit hole, or a looking-glass, where people have to go through to enter the party. Or use a play tunnel.
- You could also decorate your door, or just the doorknob, to look like the door in Disney’s cartoon movie.
- Hang up signs with ‘this way’, ‘that way’, ‘up’, ‘down’, etc. painted on them, like in Disney’s Tulgey wood.
- Put some clocks in the room that are stopped at tea-time.
- Decorate the walls with playing cards (normal size, tiny ones, or really huge cards from cardboard), and the floor with a chessboard-like pattern. Scatter around some (giant) chess pieces.
- Hang a branch to the ceiling with a Cheshire Cat plush (or just it’s grin) in it.
- Use lawn flamingos
- If you have a fireplace, put a large mirror on the mantelpiece. Or attach one to a door so people can actually go through the looking-glass. If you don’t have a huge mirror, create one with aluminium foil.
- Make rabbit paw tracks and put them on the floor, leading in various paths through your house and/or garden.
- Stick googly eyes on flowers, door knobs, playing cards, and other items.
- Put up a children’s swimming pool to represent the pool of tears.
- Make vulture heads and paste them on top of some umbrella’s. Hang the opened umbrella’s from the ceiling.
- Add wings to a rocking horse, to create a rocking-horse-fly.
- Make mome raths by taping two pencils of different colors together, and glueing some fluffy fabric or colored feathers on top of them. Then, stick them all into the grass. Make signs that say ‘Don’t step on the mome raths’ and hang them above the mome raths.
- Buy rose bushes at a garden store and decorate them with white and red roses, or stick fake roses into your own shrubbery. Perhaps add a ‘forgotten’ paintbrush as well.
- Stuff a big Alice-like doll into a small doll-house.
- Fill vases with flowers from the book, like tiger lilies, daisies, roses, violets, and larkspur.
- Fill vases with white and red roses, and hide one or several brushes with red paint in them.
For more inspiration, take a look at these great Mad Tea Party decorations.
Party favors
- Draw Alice illustrations on paper bags, or shape goody bags like a top hat, teapot, or tea cup.
- Give several kinds of tea.
- Fill a goody bag with Alice in Wonderland themed foods (see below) and attach an ‘Eat me’-label to the bag.
- Buy little bottles, fill them with a nice drink (perhaps some alcoholic drink for adult parties) and paste a ‘Drink me’-label on the bottles.
- Make buttons with Wonderland characters or quotes from the books.
- Give a set of Alice in Wonderland themed playing cards.
- Give everyone a copy of the book!
More Alice in Wonderland party favors >
Games
- Play lawn croquet: with hedgehog plush toys as balls, or perhaps hedgehogs painted on the balls. Attach colored and stuffed socks to the end of the mallets and sew on eyes, to represent flamingos, or use a lawn flamingo. Create large cardboard playing cards for the arches.
- Play chess. You can do this on a normal sized chessboard, or you can make a huge chessboard in your garden and have your guests play the pieces!
- Play “pin the grin on the Cheshire Cat“
- Buy white tea pots and tea cups, and paint your own tea set.
- Do the Caucus race. Make your guests run around in a circle, and when you shout ‘stop’ the last one to sit down/run to the middle is out. Or make a caucus version of the game musical chairs, where you remove one of the chairs each round and people have to find a chair to sit on when the music (the caucus race song from the Disney movie) stops.
- Make up silly riddles
- Play ‘Paint the roses red’. Buy some fake white roses and red paint (or markers). The person (or team) who finishes painting his rose first wins. You could give time penalties for sloppy painting or spilled drops. You could also set a general time limit and have someone dressed as the Queen of Hearts storm into the room when the time is up.
Buy some basic top hats and let your guests decorate them- Hide a small golden key or a White Rabbit plush and have your guests find it
- Do a quiz with trivia questions based on the Alice stories
- Play games with a ‘Contrariwise’ theme: make people wear name stickers, where you write their names on backwards. Everyone must call everyone else by their backwards name, or risk a forfeit. You could invent a game where names must
be called, or you could just have this going on throughout the party. Also, you could ask people questions and they must give the opposite answer. Or, say the answer, but backwards. For most of these games, some kind of time pressure is essential to make it more difficult and to make people make mistakes and have to do forfeits. The more adult the party, the more adult the questions. ‘Have you ever done xyz?’ would be interesting if people have to say the opposite. It becomes more like a truth or dare game then. - Make a game of Clean Cup: have guests assemble at table. They fill their plates with food and make their tea (or other drink) as they like for a certain amount of time. When the time is up, say “Clean cup. Clean cup. Move down. Move down.” The guests move to the next place and put more food on the plate and change the tea however they wish. This goes on and on until everyone returns to their own place setting. Now, everyone must eat and drink what the others have put. Prizes can be awarded to the most weird concoction.
- Make coloring pages for children so they can paint the roses red
- Make teams, put a bucket (or large teapot) with tea on one side and an empty one on the other side of a course. Your guests have to fill a teacup, run to the other side (with the cup in their hands, balancing the cup on a saucer, or even balancing them on their heads…), and empty the cup there. The team that has filled the bucket first wins.
- Paint some unboiled eggs to resemble Humpty Dumpty. Form teams. Lay each of the eggs on a spoon – one egg per team. Your guests have to put the other end of the spoon into their mouths, and run to the other side of the field as fast as they can without dropping the egg (and without using their hands to keep it from falling). Then they have to hand over the spoon with the egg to their teammates, who have to run back. Repeat this until all team members have run the course. The team that finishes first without dropping the egg, wins. If you drop the egg and it is still in one piece, you may continue. If the egg breaks, you’re out!
- Have an “I’m late!” potato sack race, in which everyone has to hop to the finish like the White Rabbit. Contestants should all wear rabbit ears!
- Gather a lot of teacups and put them upside down on a table. Under one of them, you hide a Dormouse (or White Rabbit). Your guests take turns and may lift one cup per turn to see whether something is underneath it. The one who finds the Dormouse wins. You can make the game harder by inventing extra rules, like shuffling the cups after each turn.
- Get a hookah and attach a bubble blower to the end (or create one by bending a wire), so you can blow soap bubbles. Who makes the largest?
- Dance the Lobster Quadrille. Everyone has to make up a silly move and teach it to the other. Then, all moves have to be performed in a row.
- Make a Jabberwock piñata and use a (plastic or wooden) sword to beat it. Who slays the Jabberwock and becomes the beamish boy?
- And of course, don’t forget: EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes!
More games to play at your Mad Tea Party >
Food and drinks
- Attach labels with the words ‘eat me’ and ‘drink me’ to all kinds of things, like the sugar bowl and bottles.
- Bake little cupcakes with the words ‘eat me’ written on them in icing, or using a stamp
- Bake cookies in the shape of the letters EAT ME, teacups, hearts, clubs, diamond and spades or other Alice in Wonderland related shapes. You can also use cookie cutters to shape sandwiches.
- Serve lots of (ice)tea, edible mushrooms, pepper soup or Mock Turtle soup, oysters, plum-pudding, and a leg of mutton. Also bring a bag with ham-sandwiches and hay.
- Glue the lid on a jar of jam, so nobody is able to open it. You know, the rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day…
- Make a cake in the shape of a mushroom or teapot. Or a three-tiered cake like in the Disney movie.
- From a loaf of bread you can create bread-and-butterflies
- Boil some eggs and paint them to resemble Humpty Dumpty. You can also have your guests paint the eggs during the party. Alternatively, leave one of the eggs unboiled… surprise when they want to eat it! This is the Humpty Dumpty who fell off the wall…
- Order (or create) some custom made tea bags or tea favors for your guests.
More (ideas for) food and drinks >
Costumes
- Of course you and your guest all dress up as Wonderland characters! You can award a prize for the best dressed person.
- Have your guests wear top-hats or rabbit ears.
- Grease-paint children as rabbits, or cats, or other Wonderland characters.
- If you need costumes, or ideas to design your own costume, check out these costume ideas or ready-made costumes.
Music
- Soundtracks from movies, like Disney’s animated movie and Tim Burton’s movie
- ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane
- ‘I am the Walrus’ by the Beatles
- ‘Looking Glass’ by Hypnogaja
- ‘Through The Looking Glass’ by Symphony X
- ‘What are you waiting for’ by Gwen Stefany (together with the video clip)
- ‘Don’t come around here no more’ by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (together with the video clip)
- Pogo has created a song from samples from Disney’s cartoon (free download)
- ‘Heads Will Roll’ by YEAH YEAH YEAHS
- ‘Alice In Wonderland’ by Wynter Gordon
- ‘Sunshine’ by Aerosmith (video clip)
- ‘Alice, Alice’ by Victim Effect
- ‘Alice’ by Lisa Mitchell
- ‘Off with your head’ by Mz. Ann Thropik
- ‘Fairytale’ by Omnia (video clip)
- ‘Jabberwocky’ by Omnia (video clip)
- ‘For Alice’ by Omnia (video clip)
- ‘The Streets fell into my window’ by The Red Paintings
- ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ by Adam Lambert
- ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’ by Bob Dylan
- ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ and ‘Jabberwocky’, by Donovan
- ‘Alice’ by Shinedown
- ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Blue Diamonds (video clip)
- ‘Wonderland’ by Taylor Swift (video clip)
More Alice in Wonderland related music >
If you have more ideas for an Alice in Wonderland tea party, let me know and I’ll add it to this list!
Examples of other Mad Hatter tea parties
Do you want to know what other people did on their Alice in Wonderland party? Check out my Pinterest board!
If you had a party yourself, send me your pictures and I may add them to this board.
Here are pictures of my very own Alice in Wonderland themed bachelorette party, which my amazing friends threw for me: