Sweet-Free & Super Fun: The Best UK Party Bag Fillers Without the Sugar Rush

Kids genuinely seem to love stickers. They’re inexpensive, and unlike another tiny plastic toy, they’re actually going to use them. Temporary tattoos are another good one (my son would happily cover his entire body in them). Even better if you can find ones printed with safer inks and without lots of plastic packaging.

“Super cheap, kids love them, not a PIA for parents.”

Hear me out on this one because yes, LEGO is plastic. But it's also the kind of plastic that gets played with for years, passed between siblings, mixed into the giant LEGO box and eventually stood on by a parent at 2am. A few people in my original post suggested buying a larger set and splitting it into tiny builds — which I think is a brilliant idea.

“I split a LEGO set into tiny bags of a few pieces with an instruction card as to what to build. For our nature themed party I printed out prints like: build something you’d find in a forest. Great for open ended play and requires only about 10 bricks per kid”

This one came from one of the comments to my post and I loved it: sometimes the “toy” doesn't need to be a toy at all. T-shirts, wooden pegs, beads, string, little wooden shapes, even the first letter of each child's name to paint or decorate. Cheap little things and a bit of imagination can go surprisingly far.

“We recently did DIY tie-dye t-shirts in lieu of goodie bags at an outdoor summer bday for this reason exactly. It was hit!”

I don't know if this is universal, but give a child a tiny notebook and a nice pencil and suddenly it's the most important notebook they've ever owned. Stationery is useful, easy to divide from multipacks and — if you choose carefully — there are some really lovely recycled options.

“In terms of gift bags recently they've had a notebook and pen or pencil selection, one time a UV type magic pen, bubbles (I refill them from a big bottle) and stickers or stampers.”

This might be my favourite suggestion of this edition: don't buy anything new at all. Charity shops, school fairs, toy swaps and other parents' cupboards are full of perfectly good toys that another child has simply grown out of. They don't even need to match. In fact, I think letting each child choose their own might be more fun.

“I went to a birthday party and instead of goody bags, they had a basket of secondhand books. Each kid got to choose one. The kids loved choosing that one book they got to take home.”