After forking over the big payment for my 4-year-old daughter’s birthday party at a “jumpy-place”--a facility padded to the nines for little kids to go nuts in--and then adding the cost of a fancy birthday cake, I struggled with the idea of providing goody bags to her little guests.

These party favor bags are always full of 99-cent store items that are useless and get tossed quickly. But even as few as four dollar-store items add up, especially when you’re buying them for 15 kids. The tyranny of this seemingly required gift for the guests reminds me of wedding reception favors. Aren’t the open bar, hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, multi-course meal and live DJ enough?

While I have always enjoyed saving money here and there, I do splurge from time to time. Case in point: having the party at the overpriced jumpy place. And though I’ve appreciated reading things like Amy Dacyczyn’s Tightwad Gazette and Judith Levine’s Not Buying It, it’s been more out of sociological fascination than anything else. But with two kids, our family budget requires we balance our splurges with some thrift.

My instincts told me it was ungracious to let the guests leave empty-handed. Certain that I wasn’t the only party parent who wanted to give something worthwhile, I did an online search that was full of enthusiastic recommendations of dollar store items as a way to save on goody bags. But Consumer Reports has reported on problems with products sold in dollar stores.

What to do?

Could I bake cookies and give two or three to each child? Not only was I short on time I truly believed that after pizza and cake, they would end up left on the floor of the car as the kids fell asleep on the way home.

I tried to come up with something useful, like coloring books. But at $4 a pop or so, even coloring books for 15 kids cost $60, which was more than I wanted to spend.

A small, potted plant? A little pricey, and visions of dirt and broken pottery on a car or bedroom floor… But wait, we were getting closer…

I went to the supermarket and bought five bunches of long-stemmed flowers (about $4 per bunch), cut all the flowers down to four-inch stems, and bundled them into mixed bouquets for each child. Not too expensive, not too wasteful, not too time-consuming. And how often do children receive fresh flowers? Bingo! Problem solved.

After a very fun play session, pizza, and cake, all the kids were too tired to even care about goody bags. But all the boys and girls were eager to get their flowers as they departed.

--Artemis DiBenedetto, Web associate editor