How to Throw a Winter Olympics Party

Tomorrow is closing ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics. If I were on top of life, I would have posted this BEFORE the opening ceremonies, or at the very least maybe the evening of the opening ceremonies after we threw our party so that this would benefit more people. Alas, I did not. However, the thing about the Olympics is that they happen every 4 years and the thing about TIME is that it goes by faster than any of us would like. I’m going to go ahead and share our delightful experience throwing a Winter Olympics party in 2026, hoping that it will be helpful to someone in 2030 and beyond. Many of these ideas could even be re-used for the 2028 summer Olympics and I do intend to make a big deal out of that one as well (though don’t expect a timely recounting).

When my kids were young, we held themed parties with friends more regularly. (For example, see this Gold Rush party or this Soap Sculpture activity that was part of a Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler book club. (In a bizarre coincidence, my family came home from skiing/snowboarding just this morning to find our dog had eaten half a bar of Ivory soap, which happens to the be last remaining bar from the set purchased for this activity all those years ago. I don’t even know where she found it.) What with pandemics and busy lives and growing kids, the number of themed parties we’ve thrown has diminished considerably over the years. Then, suddenly, a few weeks ago, I realized that these Winter Olympics would be the last of my oldest’s childhood. He’s currently 16. The next summer ones will be his senior year of high school. I couldn’t let an opportunity like this pass us by. My kids and I got to work.

Winter Olympics Menu

The easiest place to start was with a menu. My teenage daughter knows how to use Pinterest and we all have a pretty good imaginations. This is what we came up with.

We got the idea to use ice cream cones as Olympic torches off of Pinterest, though the ones my daughter found were filled with fruit. I’m sure orange sherbert combined with Cheetoes has been done by someone somewhere as it seemed the obvious filling choice to my ice cream and chip obsessed crew. I think it really was what made our party the most memorable as half of our guests were fully on board and the other half were completely disgusted.

The next big centerpiece was the fruit, which was a lovely and appreciated contribution from a friend.

My daughter found on Pinterest others who called their bottled water melted snow and we loved it.

My 13 year old daughter made these Olympic cupcakes and my 9 year old sun helped with the sorting of mini M&Ms into colored bowls to make it easier for her.

I really wanted the kids to have some actual nutrition and not fill up on dessert, so I made some peanut butter balls that I regularly make and covered them in powder sugar. The recipe is 2 cups oats, 1 cup peanut butter, 1/2 cup chocolate chips and a generous drizzle of maple syrup (maybe 1/4 cup, but I don’t measure).

I had initially thought I would make snowball cookies, but I think these peanut butter snowballs turned out better. They definitely all disappeared.

My daughter, who loves caprese salad, found some mozzarella snowmen on Pinterest and we improvised. These did not seem as popular with the kids, but were a nice adult-ish touch.

At the grocery store, my kids had the idea of calling yellow oreos, gold medal oreos, and we knew we wanted pretzels, so we got straight ones and called them ski pole pretzels.

Since we were messing with semantics to eat what we wanted, we also got popcorn and called them snowflakes.

Winter Olympics Decorations

Our primary decorations were banners that we made using folded over pieces of paper that have flags on one side and the country name on the other.

If you’d like to use these, you can download this Flags of the World printable file I created here. I may add more countries to it the next time when we do the Summer Olympics, but this time, we used 24 countries and strung them across our kitchen and in our living room window. Here is a pictures of our soap-eating dog waiting for guests to arrive.

The only other decoration we made was a banner to welcome our guests. I tried to get my kids to help me on this, but all they really did was offer suggestions for what to put. It turns out as they get older, they get more self conscious about their artistic creations.

Winter Olympics Activities

The primary activity was that we had the Opening Ceremonies playing during the entire party and watched a few key moments, namely the first 15 minutes, the beginning of the Parade of Nations, when the United States entered, and the passing of the torch and lighting of the cauldron near the end. The fact that opening ceremonies occured during a time when kids normally come over to my house anyway for a weekly chess club was a big factor spurring this party. However, I don’t think watching opening ceremonies is crucial. In the future, if the opening ceremonies are not at a convenient date and time, highlights could be watched or skipped entirely.

The part of an Olympics party that I don’t think you can do without is a little competition. At our party, we had the following “Olympic games.”

Trivia (I’ll provide some suggested questions below)
Foot race (out in the street, maybe 50 meters)
Standing broad jump (be sure you have some sidewalk chalk)
Cornhole (everyone got 3 beanbag throws. A different parent ran it, but I know they got 1 point for every beanbag that stayed on the board. I think 3 points were for touching the hole and 5 were for making it through, but I could have this off a bit. I don’t think it matters as long as the scoring is clearly laid out ahead of time.)
Jump rope (just the maximum number of jumps before messing up)
Rock Paper Scissors (my 16 year old organized a full single elimination bracket with each individual competition being best 2 out of 3).

I believe those were all the competitions that actually happened, though we had a few other ideas that we would have done if time allowed. The one that I was most hoping would happen was a talent show where a set of judges would get to write a score on one of the 5 mini white boards that I own. The kids were excited to do this, but it just felt overly ambitious to try to squeeze in near the end of the party and by that time, a giant, spontaneous game of tag had broken out.

The whole party lasted 3 hours, but the first 30 minutes were eating snacks and watching opening ceremonies and the last 30 minutes were mostly just tag and hanging out. The 2 hours in the middle that it took to do the competitions with short breaks in between felt more than sufficient. We had about 20 kids total between the ages of 3 and 16.

To honor the winners, I actually used my Cricut to print and cut circle stickers for the gold, silver, and bronze medals. I also used my Cricut to partially cut cardboard circles out of an Amazon box, but my daughter helped with a lot of that final cutting since the Cricut couldn’t go all the way through. She also affixed the stickers to the cardboard circles. To give credit where credit is due, my boys played a big part in cutting and attaching the ribbon to the medals.

In the end, I made 15 each of gold, silver, and bronze medals and then an extra 9 gold medals so that anyone who didn’t win could have a gold to take home as a souvenir. Some competitions, like the running, jumping, cornhole, and jump roping, had 3 age divisions so we needed 9 medals total for each of those competitions. The trivia and the rock-paper-scissors tournament had everyone competing in the same group, so there were only 3 each for each of those. All in all, we made 45 medals and used 42, plus we had the extra golds which came in handy, particularly for the youngest participants who sometimes had mishaps, like shoes falling off in the middle of races.

Here is the Canva Olympic Medal for Party file I created, in case you would like to modify it for your own purposes. I don’t normally share Canva files, so if you try this and have any issues, just reach out! You will obviously have to change the word on top since you probably don’t live in my city and will likely need to change the year as well since I’m so delinquent in getting this post out.

Olympics Trivia

In case it is helpful, here are the questions I asked for my Olympics Trivia competition. I’ll put the answers, though not all of these will be accurate next time.

In what country did the Ancient Olympics originate? (Greece)
In what country are the Olympics currently being held? (Italy)
How often are the Winter Olympics held? (every 4 years)
What did the first Olympians wear during the Ancient Olympic games? (nothing, they were nude)
What color is associated with third place? (bronze)
What do the 5 Olympic rings represent? (regions of the world – Europe, Asia, Africa, Americas, Australia)
Where will the Summer Olympics be held in 2028? (Los Angeles. A good number knew this since we live near LA are are excited.)

I passed out small pieces of papers and pencils. We did the quiz as a group, then we collected pencils and went over the answers as a group.

Since we had a tie for who knew the most, as I suspected we would, I came up with a few tie breaker questions.

In what city in Greece was the first modern Olympics held in 1896? (Athens)
What continent has particpated in, but never hosted the Olympic games? (Africa)
In Ancient Greece, winners did not get gold, silver, and bronze medals? What did they get instead? (laurel wreaths)
What country has hosted the Olympics the most times? (United States)
The motto of the Olympics is, in latin, “citius, altius, fortius.” What does this mean in English? (faster, higher, stronger)

We did not need to use them all, but it was helpful to have a few options just in case.

After Party

Don’t forget to actually WATCH some of the Olympics after your party. The best way to do this I’ve found is to download the Olympics app on your phone. I was able to tell it which athletes and sports we were most interested in and I would get notifications on my phone that helped us watch a few medaling events live.

One other thing we decided to do was have a movie night, just as a family, to celebrate our Olympics-themed day. Personally, we chose to watch Cool Runnings, but The Cutting Edge and Miracle might also be good choices depending on what your family enjoys and has already seen.

And that’s a pretty thorough overview of our successful Winter Olympics party! If you decide to use some or all of these ideas, I hope you have a blast!