I am a member of the Collective Bias® Social Fabric® Community. This Smurfs 2 shop has been compensated as part of a family night social shopper insights study for Collective Bias and its client.
When you think of dinner and a movie, what most likely will come to mind is a night out without your beloved children. However, when that is not possible, it might be fun to turn movie night into family night. If your family is busy like ours or if your children have early bedtimes, fitting in a full-length movie after dinner can be a bit of a crunch, so why not combine the two? If allowing your children to eat in the living room is not one of your favorite things to do, let me tell you how we were able to have an easy low-stress Smurfs 2 dinner and movie without dragging out tray tables or worrying about our children spilling their food and drinks.
There were four key factors that made our family night a success . . . a fun movie, a low-mess finger food dinner for kids, a sturdy container for the food that a child can hold steadily with one hand, and a virtually spill-proof straw cup that can be lifted one-handed. I also added some fun Smurf-themed printable labels to the food tubs and the cups. Luckily, I was able to find everything I needed in one shopping trip to Walmart.
For the food tubs, I used white Limited Edition (for the Holidays) Ziploc medium square containers and placed a Great Value clear 16oz cup inside each. I was going to use acrylic straw tumblers for the children's drinks, but then I saw these adorable handled mason jar mugs complete with lids and straws at Walmart. They came in a variety of colors, but the blue and white seemed especially perfect for our Smurfs-themed family movie night.
To add a little fun to these functional tubs and mugs, I used a downloadable image from www.SmurfHappens.com to make these printable blank Smurfs 2 tags. You can print them out and use them for name tags, favor tags, or whatever you like. Instead of putting our children's regular names on the tags, we gave them each names inspired by the Smurfs. You can write the names directly on the tags after you print them or save the image to your computer to add text digitally before you print the tags out.
TO PRINT: Make sure your printer is on and ready to print. Click on the image below to enlarge. Then right-click and choose print. Use your browser's back arrow to return to this page.
I was just going to pick up the Smurfs 2 DVD for our family night, but found the Holiday Blu-ray & DVD Movie Gift Set on sale at Walmart, so I could not resist buying it. Papa Smurf was always my favorite Smurf!
For beverages, we gave our children milk because that is what they usually drink at dinner. Also, it doesn't hurt that it's not sticky, doesn't stain, and it goes with our Smurfy blue and white theme!
For the finger foods, we chose to serve kid-friendly Batter Dipped Chicken Breast Tenders made by Tyson in Original and in Honey paired with fries. Both were easy to prepare in the oven and easy to serve. The fries were served inside the clear cup, which was surrounded by the batter tenders.
This family night was a huge success because of the hot, tasty, and filling batter chicken dinner, the kid-friendly tubs and mugs, and a movie that all 3 children found to be hilarious. We will definitely be doing dinner and a movie with the whole family again soon. It was such a fun, stress-free, and mess-free evening. Which movie would you recommend for our next movie night?
By the time we were done with the movie, our children were stuffed and it was getting close to their bedtime. If you start your Smurfs movie night earlier, here are some fun activity ideas for after the movie . . .
- Play Hot Potato with your plush Smurf toy.
- Serve blue M&M chocolate chip cookies (baked in advance).
- Print the Smurfs 2 coloring pages for your children to color while watching the movie's bonus features.
What other ideas do you have for fun ways to wrap up family movie night?
