How to Host a Fairy Party

What you need:

1. A woods, or some other moonlit or mystical spot.
2. Little girls
3. Lots of imagination

Our party started with these:

Three porcelain shoes sitting in a row on my dresser, almost, but not quite big enough for a little girl to get her foot into.

Madison tried it, and even tried taking a step, and yes, that is why there is a chip in one of the toes.

She was fascinated by the shoes, tried them on every time she visited. “Why do you have these?” she asked.

“Oh, I keep those for fairy parties,” I replied airily. “On moonlit nights I go out at midnight and dance in the woods with the fairies.”

“Really? Can we come with you?”

And thus was born the fairy party.

I had planned to make an event of it: to make miniature cupcakes and have my brothers and sisters stand in the bushes with sparklers in lieu of fairies. But late summer strangled us in school preparation, hay making, camping, and all the other activities August screams to be absolutely, without a doubt, necessary. The fairy party was pushed off to the last week before school, to a day when the girls were staying over anyway. “Please, please, please can we have the fairy party?” MacKenzie begged.

So the fairy party came last minute, without fanfare. And here’s the secret about fairy parties: you don’t need any of that, anyway. They work just fine in unplanned spots, at last-minute times, with small pieces of apple and cucumber and cheese to eat instead of cupcakes. And fairies absolutely love peanut butter and honey sandwiches if you cut the pieces very small.

Little girls are experts on imagination. They made their own fairies.

And no, it is not Glamdring, the elvish sword from Lord of the Rings, which MacKenzie wields–but doesn’t it just look like it, though?

After we and the fairies had supped and were filled, we lay on our backs on top of my van-hut and looked at the stars through a clearing in the leaves.

At midnight we came down and danced. Then we blew out our citronella lanterns, hiked out of of the woods by the light of the flashlight, drove home to pull off our boots and jackets and things and pile into my bed.

And that was the end of the fairy party! They’re simple to host because fairies and little girls are very easy to please.

Anyone can do it.