Eleventh Hour Party: A Curious No Murder Mystery Dinner
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For her 11th birthday, my daughter wanted a party unlike all others and based on one of our family’s favorite books: The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery. So, what is any mom’s first step for executing a themed party? Search Pinterest for a template. To my horror, there wasn’t one, so I got creative and made my own! Now I want to share it here for any others who adore this book and may want to have their very own Eleventh Hour Party.
What is The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery?
The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery is a sweet whodunit children’s picture book written and illustrated by Graeme Base. On the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Horace the elephant turns 11. He wants to celebrate with 11 of his best friends by hosting a fancy party. He makes an elaborate feast full of decadent desserts and plans a day full of fun games. When it comes time to eat, everyone discovers the feast has been eaten! The characters all provide their defenses and Horace saves the day by serving his friends sandwiches and the cake he had waiting separately. Base concludes the book by asking readers if they know who ate the feast. He cleverly leaves clues on every page to help readers solve the mystery and ends the book with a cipher for readers to check their accusations. The final pages reveal all the hidden messages and images throughout the book.
Concepting the Party
My husband, daughter, and I spent some time imagining how we could make this book come to life! We debated asking everyone to come as their favorite Eleventh Hour character but didn’t want duplicates. Then we thought we could assign characters from the book but thought that might not be fun for the kids. Finally, we decided they could create their own characters! I thought it might be fun if my daughter gave them a jumping-off point like a name and some simple character traits (it turned out that providing names was essential - more on that later).
Next, I wrote down all the games and food listed throughout the book. My daughter and I went through and made decisions on what we could make work.
Finally, I asked her if she wanted to mystery to be the same as the book or different. She wanted to be surprised! So, I got to brainstorming with my husband.
The Eleventh Hour Invitations
We know that many families are not familiar with The Eleventh Hour, so my daughter and I thought it would be fun to give everyone a copy of the book along with the invitation (I spent months keeping an eye on used copies but ended up buying new paperbacks for everyone). We encouraged them to read it and try to solve the mystery! I did my best to recreate the invitation on Canva to match the book, then printed their character assignments on the backside. We hand-delivered the invitations with the books to most kids. A couple were mailed in large envelopes for less than $2 each.
To help with names and knowing who was who, I provided all guests with name tags upon arrival. The kids all had so much fun dressing as their characters and adding more to their personas. We encouraged everyone to use character names and to try to stay in character as much as they could.
Eleventh Hour Decor
Decor was the hardest area for me to match the book. There was nothing affordable I could think of to make my house look like a castle, so I picked a color and went to Target. I chose gold and white and thought it would be fun to go a little over the top (if you prefer Amazon, these and this will work great!). All but the balloons can be saved in the decorations bin and used for another birthday. I found some cute, gold “party animal” cupcake toppers on Amazon that I thought would be the perfect way to include the animals of The Eleventh Hour. I had balloon stands in my decorations bin that I put to work to add some fun to the tables.
I placed signs around the house to show everyone the different party areas - just like in the book. It was fun for the kids who come over often to see how we labelled the house.
Eleventh Hour Games
After reviewing all the games in the book, my daughter and I decided on the 7 we knew we could pull off:
Sack Races: I bought burlap sacks and my husband put the kids into brackets to race
Musical Chairs
Small Group Games: Snakes & Ladders, Card Games (they ended up mostly playing Go Fish), and Chess.
Blind Man’s Buff: here are some instructions if you aren’t familiar! We confined the play to a particular area of our driveway and had adults monitoring for safety.
Tug o’ War: I tied two sheets together, but this Tug o' War Rope would have been better.
It was really fun to have to kids play all these old classic party games! Many of the games were totally new to them.
Eleventh Hour Food
My daughter envisioned a fabulous feast of desserts for her party. I worried there would be too much sugar. We worked together and came up with the idea of serving sandwiches as dinner, having a dessert buffet limited to a small plate, and sending a take-out box of treats home with each child. Instead of pre-making sandwiches as Horace does in the book, I stacked the bread and had a bunch of ingredients available for everyone to make their own. I anticipated much less waste and much more eating this way.
My daughter had one specific request from the book: the chocolate supreme. I had no idea what that could be. I asked her if she thought my chocolate mousse recipe would work, and she emphatically agreed. This recipe has been a hit in our family for years, I just made the presentation more glamorous by adding dollops of whipped cream and cherries.
As for drinks, it is very clear in the book that lemonade was important! I had this awesome beverage fountain just waiting to be used and thought it would be perfect! So, I got out my plastic champagne flutes and added gold straws, which made the setup look great and really wowed the kids. They loved being able to get their lemonade!
Recreating the Mystery
The mystery had to be different from the book, but what would be easy to pull off? Stealing the gifts! My husband and I thought that the gifts going missing would be easy and effective. I decided that there should be an area dedicated to displaying the gifts and that all the guests would deposit them at the start of the party. In drawing attention to the gifts and giving them a prominent location, I hoped it would be obvious when they went missing.
My husband and I decided that we could trust our 5-year-old son to be the culprit. We informed him a few days before the party and he was excited! During Blind Man’s Buff, he was sent into the house where I helped him hide the gifts. Once hidden, I sent him right back out to keep playing. None of the kids seemed to pay much attention since he is always coming and going from activities! After the gifts were hidden, I scattered empty gift bags and torn tissue paper all around the gift table.
After Tug o’ War, the kids were sent inside to do presents and then feast. They were shocked to find the presents missing!
The Script
Each child was then handed a custom script. I thought it would be overwhelming and not as magical to have the full script. Instead, I wrote the order in which they speak and only their lines.
Each guest gave their defense until finally, my daughter announced, “The presents are gone, we can’t change that, but now it’s clear to see that what we need is cheering up - just come and feast with me!”
The Notes for Detectives
While the kids ate, they continued to discuss their thoughts on who did. My son, did such a great job never revealing himself. Surprisingly, he got very few verbal accusations that he had to address. In the spirit of the book, we thought it would be fun to provide the Notes for Detectives with a cipher like in the book. I made a Cipher Helper since some of the kids were young and could benefit from a little help. To solve the cipher, the kids just needed to use the name of the person they most suspected and see if it could decode the cipher. We handed these out about halfway through dinner so they could work on solving the mystery.
This is where it became clear that knowing the guests’ names in advance had been imperative. We decided to provide the names ourselves, but you could have guests provide their character names by a certain date to create your cipher!
I provided each kid with an Accusation Card so we could collect all the accusations and present the results. Only half the kids accused the correct culprit! It was fun to see their reactions to finding out the truth. After revealing the truth, the presents were brought out and opened.
This party certainly took a lot of thought and planning, but it was a lot of fun and totally worth it! This would make an excellent book club event or theme day for anyone wanting to read and bring The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery to life.
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