Eagle Scout Court of Honor Ideas

We recently held an Eagle Scout Court of Honor for our second eldest son. When our oldest son became an Eagle, I scoured Pinterest for ideas and thankfully found some great ones, but we also came up with some of our own. I am excited to share some of those Eagle Scout Court of Honor ideas with you today.

There is a lot of planning that can go into these courts of honor so I am hoping this post can help make someone else’s life easier. When we were planning the first one, it felt almost like we were planning a mini wedding! No kidding! There are invitations to send out, programs to design, a ceremony to pick and refreshments and food to plan. Whew! It is a lot! Now of course you could do it on a much smaller scale but we like to go big or go home! 😉 Seriously though, this is an important milestone in your son’s (and soon could be your daughter’s) life and they have worked really hard for it. We think they deserve a big celebration!

So in essence, if you are planning an Eagle court of honor then you are in luck, because this post is going to be long and have lots of pictures!! If you are not planning a court of honor, some of these ideas could also be used for 4th of July parties or other patriotic themed events. At least take a look at the pictures! 🙂

When we held our oldest son’s Eagle court of honor, we did it by ourselves and it was for him alone. This time #2 son joined up with a couple of his friends and we held a joint court of honor at our church. That made some things easier, we were able to split up some of the to do list and also split the cost.  Because we had already held one previously, we had a lot of the groundwork laid. For both boys, we used a ceremony that I love! We didn’t want to use the same script as everyone else in the troop and this one is unique and worded so nicely! I found it online, you can find it here. Thank you to whomever wrote this ceremony!! It is amazing!

We changed the ceremony a little to fit for our Eagle Scouts and also incorporated a small script for Cub Scout ranks to be represented. We made the candle stands and placards to represent each rank. During the ceremony, a scout from the troop comes up the center aisle to light a candle and stand by his rank.

I think that is my favorite part of the ceremony, that it actually shows people how long the scouts have been on this journey. Some from a Tiger Scout in first grade! Just saying that they have been in scouts since they were a Tiger versus seeing a little first grade Tiger Scout walking up the aisle to light a candle is a different thing. The vision of how young they are when they started this trail to Eagle really hits home.  The Cub Scouts lit their candles and put them in the arch on the right.

For the table centerpieces we incorporated some different ideas I had seen on Pinterest and some of our own. We made up the boxes out of pallet boards and painted one of the 12 points of the Scout Law on each box. The words were painted onto the boxes using stencils we made with our Cricut. We picked out a different font to use for each word and sanded it a little to make it look more distressed. In case anyone is interested in recreating them, the pallet board box dimensions are 24″ long, 4.75″ wide, 2 13/16″ high. We also put an additional board on the inside to make them not so deep to hold candles, twine balls and stars. That insert was put in at 1 1/8″ from the top.

The red and blue twine balls were made by wrapping twine around a partially inflated balloon. We dipped the string in glue before it was wrapped around the balloon. Here is a helpful tutorial for how to make them. We made 2 different sizes of balls to give some interest to the boxes. After the glue was dry, we painted them red and blue. The white stars were actually made from cereal boxes! Here is a tutorial for them.

The food tables were the best part, in my opinion! 😉 We had a cupcake display, a trail mix bar, some mints and refreshments. I was in charge of the cupcake display. After looking around at ideas for cupcake displays (mostly from wedding pins…see what I mean…mini wedding!), I decided on going with some wooden crates to set the cupcakes on. I thought the crates would go well with the scouting theme. They also tied into the rusticness of the pallet boards on the tables. The other mom was in charge of the trail mix bar and little did we know that she had also planned to use wooden crates so it turned out perfect!

This eagle statue was the perfect centerpiece for the display. And the books just give some added visual interest. 🙂

I decided to make 5 different flavors of cupcakes for people to choose from. Each crate would hold a different flavor. To label each crate, I made up some letters and printed them out on card stock. Here are the letters if you are interested in using them. You can just print them on white card stock and cut out the circles. I used some tiny clothespins that I found in the craft section at Walmart to attach the letters to a piece of twine. The wood of the crates was rough enough that the twine just stuck to them. Well except for the top crate, that was one we had already and the wood is a little smoother. So I just added a couple dots of hot glue to attach the twine to the top crate.

What do you think of the DIY cupcake liners? I am a fan! 🙂 I think the liners make the cupcakes look like they came from a bakery! The cupcake liners were super easy to make, check out the tutorial to make some of your own. Also, check out this post on how to easily fill cupcakes. It is a game changer! The cupcakes were delicious by the way! We got rave reviews on them!

The trail mix bar was adorable! It really nailed the scouting theme!

The kids all LOVED the different candy available on the trail mix bar and went back for more several times! The other mom did a fabulous job with this. She was a joy to work with as we are both go-getters so you knew a job would get done if either of us was in charge of it! 🙂

I love how she used camping mugs and measuring cups to scoop out the different items. She also made the cream cheese mints and they were so good!

Have you noticed all the embroidered stars around the table? My MIL made those up, they turned out great! They were perfect to add as decoration fillers to the tables.

Unfortunately we did not get any pictures of the beverage table. I wish we would have had more time to take some pictures of everything set up right before the event! But that is such a busy time. One tip that I have for you to save some stress is to set up the night before if possible! We did that this time and it was so nice to have most everything set up already.

I still had to frost cupcakes and arrange them the morning of the court of honor but it was way less stress this time. For our oldest son’s court of honor, we had to decorate the church hall, frost cupcakes and assemble a cake all in that morning. It was a very stressful day. Here is a picture of the cake we made for our oldest’s Eagle Court of Honor.

We had found a picture on Pinterest and made one to replicate it. I loved how it turned out but would not want to do that again! It was A LOT of work! Let’s just say we will not be going on Cake Boss anytime soon! Ha! Anyway, that is why we went the easier route this time with just cupcakes. 😉

We set up some memorabilia tables in the back of the room. The tables displayed all the boy’s pinewood derby cars, cub scout uniforms, patches and other keepsakes.

This keepsake box was a gift and will hold our son’s merit badge, a flag that was flown over the United States Capitol Building on the day of his court of honor and whatever else he wants to put in there. What an awesome gift, huh? We filled it with our older son’s things to show what it will look like after he is done with scouting.

The ceremony turned out great and all the boys had a good time. It was so much fun to celebrate their achievements. I hope you have gotten some inspiration from these ideas. Hopefully we will have 2 more Eagles in the family and get to do this a couple more times! I am sure it will get easier each time, right? 😉