Parties can be great opportunities to unite your friends and family. Indeed, more than a year spent distancing from your loved ones during this pandemic has likely lit the desire to start planning events for when you are all able to share in others’ company again. However, you may not be keen to host just another familiar get-together with the same old activities. You want to provide a new experience and an opportunity for everybody involved to forge wonderful memories.
This is, of course, no mean feat. Creating truly memorable moments from scratch can take a significant amount of time and work. Trying to make arrangements while undertaking your many home, career, and family responsibilities can leave you feeling uninspired and let’s face it too exhausted to enjoy the process or the outcome! Part of the solution here is not to focus on the big picture of the whole event, but rather adjust some of the activities or framework to enhance the time you spend together.
Let’s review a few useful approaches to this concept. What types of activities can help to make your events more fun, interesting, and memorable? How can you adjust the key occasions you want to celebrate in ways that have the most positive impact?
Themes
To pull off great family events, you need to take advantage of versatile planning tools. Themes can be an agile and creative approach here. However, to get the most out of this, it’s important to pay attention to some key areas.
These include:
- Letting the Theme Lead
One of the best parts about incorporating a theme is that it immediately provides you with some choices for each element of the party. If you decide to hold a jungle-themed kid’s birthday party, for instance, this provides clear and creative directions for your decorations and invitation designs. Healthy snacks can be made more exciting by sculpting them into animal shapes. The jungle suggests creative costumes, and even opportunities to have activities that take advantage of both indoor and outdoor spaces. Allocating a theme can be a great way to unlock your event creativity blocks.
- Involving Your Guests
The theme as an event tool always works so much better when everyone involved is fully on board. Give your guests as much information as possible, so that they can understand exactly what type of party it is, and how they should be dressing or preparing for it. Use the theme as a way to get them excited for the experience, and even be open to their activity suggestions beforehand.
Equipment
Being creative about using tools to develop activities can mean the difference between another dull game, and a memorable event.
It’s worth considering:
- Technology Use
We’ve all adopted technology as part of our lives. It can also be a tool to enhance parties. If you or a friend has access to a metal detector, this can make for a unique hunting opportunity. Particularly if you have a space theme, you and your guests can take detectors to local fields for meteorite hunting. Provide guides on how to distinguish meteorites from other rocks they’re magnetic and have a glassy fusion crust. However, you don’t always need to use specialist equipment for every theme. Most families have multiple cell phones that can be put to good party activity use. Create scavenger hunts where teams need to use online maps of the neighborhood to find clues, and take photographs of the found objects, or even film themselves dancing a specified landmark.
- The New from the Familiar
You don’t have to go out of your way or to additional expense to obtain equipment for activities. You can set up obstacle courses using familiar household objects in new ways. A science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) event can make use of common ingredients to make gunge, or various home items to create a Rube Goldberg machine. Adapt old party games using unusual objects charades in which you must use LEGOs to build clues or Name That Tune played on household objects instead of playing the intro on a device. Get creative with what already exists in your home.
Shared Experiences
One of the best ways to make activities and events memorable is by enhancing the emotional connection that you have with them. When you approach events in a way that helps guests of all ages gain an appreciation of why they’re celebrating, everyone gets the most out of the experience.
Some options here can include:
- Sharing Your Stories
When you’re planning a party to celebrate a key life event, frame the party around telling the story of that event. Wedding anniversaries attended by the whole family are a prime example in this regard. Relatives and children will understand that it is a happy occasion, but they can gain insights into just how meaningful it is if they get to experience your story. Create playlists that signify important moments in your relationship. Make stations of photographs throughout the venue, coupled with significant objects that help illustrate locations. These present opportunities to ask questions, and for everyone to share stories that bring extra depth and meaning to the event.
- Sharing Your Uniqueness
One of the reasons that your standard party can be so uninspiring is that it doesn’t really reflect the uniqueness of you and your guests. If you’re having a gender reveal party, for instance, avoid using the same old cliches. Create a scenario for the reveal that reflects your family’s relationship to one another and the event if you’re a competitive family, create a fun race or game that sees the smartest, fastest, or most creative grandparent, sibling, or child hunt down the location of the reveal information and make the announcement.
Conclusion
Family events don’t have to have familiar shapes and styles. Utilize tools such as themes, household items, and your relationships to guide your creativity. With some outside-of-the-box thinking and a focus on what makes your family unique, you have the opportunity to create some amazing memories together.
I’m a 20-something stay-at-home mother and wife. I have an amazing husband, a beautiful daughter, two loving dogs, and a lazy cat. I wouldn’t change my life for anything! I love to read, listen to music, cook and blog!
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