Written by Brandie Weikle
Birthday parties are a lot of work.
You’ve got to settle on a location and maybe a theme. If the party isn’t at home, you probably have to pay upfront for pottery class or laser quest or manicures or whatever. You’ve got to buy and send the invites, hoping against hope that they don’t languish in the bottom of backpacks. And then there’s sourcing and buying loot bag stuff that isn’t total crap, baking (or ordering) a cake, and figuring out how to manage the chaos for 120 minutes (not that we’re counting).
We know the frustration of gathering RSVPs in time to pay the appropriate per-child rate, of rude parents who don’t bother to get back to you and of no-shows and last-minute attendees that leave you scrambling for another cupcake, loot bag or rock climbing instructor.
Still, we think these parents in Cornwall, England went too far when they sent a bill home from school with a five-year-old boy who missed their son’s birthday party. For real.
As this Telegraph story explains, the parents received an invoice for £15.95 for a “child’s party no-show fee,” presumably meant to offset the cost the hosts incurred needlessly when their little boy, Alex Nash, didn’t show up for the outing to a ski hill.
It’s clear here that Alex’s parents didn’t quite handle correctly their son’s last-minute decision to go on an outing with his grandparents instead of to the party. They replied “yes” for their child, then gave him the day-of option of not going, even though they had no phone number or email address for the parents organizing it. And while the mother apparently “looked out for” the other mother on the playground to try to apologize that week, the parents should have gone further and sent an apologetic note home with the birthday boy on the Monday.
Perhaps if they had they wouldn’t have received the bill a week later, by which time the situation had obviously festered with the lack of apology.
Nevertheless, the bill is too much. We take our chances when we host expensive birthday parties (admittedly all the more appealing in the dead of winter when you don’t want a gaggle of kids climbing your living-room walls). A kid could miss for any number of reasons, including illness. That wasn’t the case in this instance, but the point is that we’re not guaranteed a return on our investment. Stuff happens.
And there’s also this. Sometimes it’s just too much with the birthday parties. There are only two days on the weekend during which we get really good stretches of family time, and we’ve also got to get the groceries, do laundry and a million other things during on those days. There are times when driving to a location a good distance from your neighbourhood is enough to tempt even the most considerate people to drop out at the last minute.
We love the idea of a skiing birthday party, but here’s something to think about: You can do the environment and other parents a favour by hosting your child’s birthday party in your own community so there’s no long drive. Look around—there could be a community centre gym, condo party room or art studio you’ve overlooked in favour of those big indoor play gyms in some industrial park.
One thing’s for sure: The story of the party no-show invoice proves things have gotten a little out of hand on the birthday party circuit.
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