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That 50th birthday party can be a tough one to host. Since "The Big 5-0″ tends to be a little traumatic for most people, it is wise to stay away from the typical Over-the-Hill, dress in black, mourning parties. This Genuine Antique Person party is a great way to celebrate, just a little bit tongue in cheek.

Decorations:

This type of party has a couple of decorating possibilities.

1. One idea is to use lots of real antiques that can come from your home or homes of friends and relatives. Things like lanterns, oil lamps, butter churns, old kitchen utensils like hand mixers, old suitcases, pails, bowls and candlesticks—anything from that era that you can scour up. This is definitely the easiest option and one that worked well for my family since we all have many items that we could contribute to the decorating scheme.

2. The other possibility is to just go with an aged county theme which you should also be able to do fairly inexpensively. Rather than using real antiques which you may not have access to, you can use an antiquing product. There are many choices in the large home stores, like crackle products, patina, rust and a dark antiquing product. Use these products to "age" many different items. New metal pails can be antiqued to look rusted, wooden bowls and candlesticks can be crackle-painted.

If you like, you can also use some of the "prairie style" fabrics to decorate, using dusty blue, green and red calico fabrics for tablecloths.

Food:

Take foods from the birthday person’s past. Everyone has great family recipes that they love to eat. My birthday menu was Scandinavian and included Potato Dumplings, Ham, and Boiled Rutabagas. My best friend’s menu included Sausage, Knephla and Sauerkraut, Cheese Buttons, Strudels and Kuchen. You can order a birthday cake if you like or when people offer to bring something, snag those offers from relatives and have them bring some family dessert recipes. This type of menu can work very well for a family potluck since most of your family knows how to make your family favorites!

Costumes

On the invitations, ask people to come in costumes that would be appropriate for a town’s centennial celebration. The town I live in has a costume rental shop that makes this really easy but even thrift stores can have a pretty good selection of clothes to choose from that you could make work. Creamy lace blouses with cameo brooches…

Group Gift:

Go together with several people to host the party and all of you can go together to make the recipient a group gift. A simple block quilt can be sewn very easily—there are many sites that teach how to make them but they don’t take a lot of time; you could have one sewn together in a couple of evenings. What makes it meaningful is that you can take old photos of the genuine antique person and copy them to photo transfer paper, making it easy to iron on to a light colored fabric square. There are many photo editing sites out there (like www. picnik.com) where you can even add messages to the pictures if you like before you print them. Transfer pictures to half of the blocks (on light colored fabric) and leave the other half for guests to sign messages with a fabric marker.

You could also do this on a smaller scale with a lap quilt or even a pillow.

If these ideas still sound like too much work; you could use the same idea with a T-shirt or sweatshirt. Transfer a photo if you like or just have a shirt embroidered with the words, "Genuine Antique Person".

Old Time Photo Background

By hanging a pair of drapes on the wall (something that would look like a heavy curtain with a swagged, fringed valance works well), you can create a background for an old time photo studio. Add an old style rug to the floor, an antique looking chair and other antique looking props to send your guests home with a copy of their old time photo as a party favor.

This is a party that can be put together without a ton of advance preparation and planning if you can team up with some family members and share the work load. The antiques scattered around can be a conversation starter and it gives the younger people in attendance a chance to learn about the past from the older people in attendance.

Good luck and have fun with your party!

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