I graduated in 1984.
Before you do all the math, I'm 53 and that was 35 years ago.
Some days it seems like yesterday, but most days I fully realize that time has passed and high school was a long time ago.
Perhaps you are working on your class reunion, or have one coming up, or even planning a family reunion.
Today, I'm going to share the HOW of planning this reunion, along with some photos of the actual event.
It was our best reunion ever, so what we did leading up to it really worked.
Let's Party!
After dinner, classmates gathered in the upper part of the barn to have our photo taken by our talented classmate Paula (she's on the front row, far right).
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| Photo Credit: Paula M Shannon, 2019 |
The first thing?
Procure your venue, as this may set the theme for your party.
We used a local, refurbished barn: The Barn at Vanderwende Acres.
The casual, farm-like setting allowed us to center our theme as a "Boots, Beer, and BBQ" event.
This meant that jeans were the dress-code, rustic was the decor, and family-style was the meal.
After 35 years, everyone was happy to wear comfortable casual clothing!
When it came to decor, we went with the barn theme and choose royal blue and goldenrod bandanas as napkins, aluminum pie plates as dinnerware, and picnic salt and pepper packets as our rustic condiments.
Our centerpieces were stacks of books covered with brown paper and "decorated" with Crayola marker doodles.
In our day, we HAD to cover our school books, so we did so with brown paper grocery bags turned inside out so you could doodle on the covers.
I "borrowed" mason jars and faux sunflowers from my mom's class of 1963 decorations and placed several printed pennants and themed skewers among the sunflowers.
As you can see above, we had all the decor items ready to transport to the barn.
Classmates showed up early to decorate the barn.
Simple white table cloths, the bandanas, the centerpieces, and the rustic chairs lent a casual elegance to the dining area.
Here's a close up of the centerpieces with the all the added themed skewers.
These were created from internet images, glued to card stock, and attached to long shish-kebob skewers.
These are a great way to add "bulk" to an arrangement in a themed setting. For pennies on the dollar, you have added depth and interest to an otherwise generic setting.
Decorating the book spines was a hoot when a small group of us got together to cover and make these book sets.
We used a roll of brown paper for ease, and then we had a hilarious time trying to remember the classes that we actually took in high school.
I never remember "Band" having a textbook!
Adding the school's colors with bandanas worked for us in several ways.
Bandanas are cheap, and since most of the decor items came from Amazon, we were able to get these for less than a $1 apiece. We also encouraged each person to take theirs as a favor.
It also added loads of color to the tables and fit in perfectly with the barn venue.
The extra bandanas were used under the centerpieces and throughout the other areas of the barn.
We made sure to add a large plain paper napkin on top of the bandana so that it wasn't soiled during dinner.
Vanderwende's is also a dairy that has an ice cream truck that we rented for dessert, hence the ice cream ticket above each napkin.
During dinner, we had each table play Bingo as a team.
We played about a minute of 25 of the 100 top songs of 1984. The team had to use the hi-lighter to cover that song on their individual board.
The table that got Bingo first was awarded a free drink ticket for each table member.
I used myfreebingocards.com to generate different Bingo cards for each table. You can make up to 30 random cards for free!
It was a hit with the group!
Here's a great shot of the barn prior to everyone arriving.
We turned off the overhead lights and just used the candles on the table and the string lights which created a great ambiance.
We had a table at the entrance where classmates and guests made their own name tags.
After 35 years, some of us needed reminders of who was who!
I reused a poster from the class of 1963 and covered it with a smaller poster and some Cricut vinyl letters as a welcome to the guests.
That Peaches and Herb song came out when we were all in middle school!
The bar area was set up using some rustic Dollar Tree frames as our cocktail menus, another mason jar arrangement, and a bandana.
We made sure to have a table remembering the eight classmates that had passed away.
I had found some great ideas on Pinterest and used a small poem and candle as a tribute.
Prior to our prayer before eating that evening, we had a moment of silence while each deceased classmate's name was read out loud.
We created a table of collected memorabilia including elementary pictures and past class reunion photos.
At the end of the night, the table was in total disarray because folks had really looked it over and had amazing discussions about each and every piece.
Several ideas came from Pinterest!
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| Photo Credit: Paula M Shannon, 2019 |
If you can believe it, it took us about 20 minutes to get into this configuration and it was a noisy mess during the process.
But, if you look at all the smiles in this photo it truly reflects how incredible the night was, how much fun it was to be together again, and how time and age don't matter when you are with forever friends.
At this point, there are no rules, just great memories of days past, days present, and days to come!
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