Mini party favors

A party bag is a fixed number of children and a fixed number of dollars, so the arithmetic runs the other way from every other page on the site: you know the count before you know the present. Twelve, sixteen, twenty-four. What fills them well is one thing that does one thing, a fidget, a pop keyring, a bubble wand, a mini notebook, rather than several small things that end up mixed on the floor by the time the bags are handed out.

Two practical notes. Anything with a bead, a glued eye or a piece that comes off belongs to the older end of a party, and the size on the card is a better guide than the age on the packet. And bags that go home in a car boot get sat on, so the pieces that survive are the flat ones and the soft ones; anything with a thin plastic clip arrives broken often enough to matter. The plush on this page survives that journey better than anything else on it.