It can feel like there’s a lot of pressure sometimes to host ‘perfect’ events, what with the advent of Pinterest and Instagram and the like. My family is Big on Events, and we can Pinterest party like it’s… uh, 2018. I’ve been involved in plenty of events-coordination that took weeks and even months of planning, and my sisters, mother and I have collaborative Pinterest boards spawning out our ears.
But let’s face it: My life is packed. I don’t have TIME to hold Pinterest events. And honestly? I tried one for my birthday a while ago when I turned 30 and… eh. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was amazing. It’s just that the sheer amount of work coordinating on the day meant I was pretty stuffed by the time the party actually *started*.
Also, many of the “events” I’m doing these days are for kids, and you know what? A three-year-old doesn’t care if you spent six hours on their party or one or twelve. They just love that it’s a party.
But! It is entirely possible to get a party worthy of Pinterest and Instagram WITHOUT dying, losing your chill, and making you want to stab your eyeballs out by the time the party arrives. All it takes is a little bit of planning…
PART ONE: THE PREP
1: FOCUS
The first really important step is to figure out which bit of partying you actually enjoy. My middle sister loves decorating. My mum loves cooking. Me? I love the cake. (Okay shush, I can hear your shock and surprise from here :P) So for me, that’s my deal-breaker: everything else I can hack, but the cake needs to be top-notch.
Figure out that one thing that is make-or-break for you as far as an awesome, wow-factor party is concerned. It is having the entire room full of themed decorations? It is an incredible, awe-inspiring cake? It is having every item of food totally in theme? Or is it something else entirely?
2: IDEA KERNEL
Okay, now that you know what’s important to you focus-wise, it’s time to brainstorm some ideas. Chances are you or the person you’re planning for has this bit covered for you: my son requested a Toy Story party for his birthday in 2017. (Incidentally, “Toy Story” is too big a kernel for a keeping-yourself-alive party, so we narrowed it down further: Buzz was his favourite character, so we’d be having a Buzz focus.)
In 2018, it was pirates, with a clear focus on ‘treasure island’ rather than skull-and-crossbones (which helpfully let me weed out a LOT of ideas that were cool, but just didn’t fit).
Figuring 2017 was the last year I’d really get to steer the party-theme ship for the baby, I decided to do narwhals, because NARWHALS, Y’ALL. However, when we discovered that she was totally obsessed with cows about two months out, I flipped and we went with cows instead. (Still hoping to convince her to do narwhals at some point…)
It’s important that you hone in on that one specific thing is that you’re interested in, because it helps when it’s time to…
3: BRAINSTORM
While you can totally do this months ahead (and I do because I like to get things sorted during school holidays so term time is less frenetic), you do run the risk of having to flip if the person’s interest changes (especially with kids). Of course, you can always say, “Tough luck!” Your call.
What you DON’T want to be doing, though, is planning the night before. Har. But with that said, if you use this system you could easily pull off a low-stress, Pinterest-worthy party with only a week’s planning, if you can either do everything yourself or have people you can outsource to. It took me maybe an hour to totally plan the pirate treasure party, and if I’d been so inclined, I could have done all the prep in the week before, even around work (though it would have meant a week of nothing but work + party prep).
So what exactly do you plan? EVERYTHING, but usually in a specific order.
First of all, hold onto your idea kernel. It’s going to be your guiding light when you come across ideas that are shiny but ultimately distracting.
Secondly, brainstorm. I do this on Pinterest because it’s a great way to generate a lot of ideas fast, and you don’t have to do the thinking because you can pretty much be guaranteed that someone out there has already done it for you. Alternatively, you could do image searches on Google; you’ll still get some good results, it’s just more of a pain to try to save them and they might not be as strictly relevant.
So what am I searching for? Anything around my idea kernel. For the Toy Story party I searched ‘Toy Story cakes’, ‘Buzz Lightyear cakes’, ‘Toy Story party’, ‘Toy Story food’, etc. Often on Pinterest you can luck out and find that someone’s helpfully put together some composite images that show the food, the decorations, and the cake all in one; these can be a great place to look for ideas, especially for food.
For the baby’s party, you can see the original Pinterest board below. If you note that the first pins are at the bottom and most recent are at the top, you’ll see the gradual drift in ideas: my idea kernel was narwhals with mermaids in a teal-and-purple colour scheme, so down the bottom of the board are a lot of mermaidy pins with purple and teal colour-schemes. However, as I went along you’ll see that the pins drift towards silver + blue + Arctic. I had this thought that since it was a winter party and narwhals are Arctic I could incorporate that… but because I had my idea kernel, I realised I was drifting away from what I really wanted, and knew it was time to stop brainstorming.
When I was re-brainstorming for the cow party, I knew I’d be looking at a lot of farm party things – but because I knew I wanted to focus specifically on *cows*, I could avoid getting distracted by all the cute general-farm-themed stuff out there, and it literally took 15 minutes to put together a pretty huge board. Same with the pirate treasure party.
You know it’s time to stop brainstorming either when you find yourself repeating a lot of ideas, or when you start to drift away from your kernel. You can get a perfectly decent brainstorm done in 10-15 minutes.
