Warm Up Your Winter Family Reunion With These Summer-Themed Ideas

Articles

Planning family reunions on a regular basis, whether yearly or once a decade, is an important way to build unity with one another, establish and maintain traditions, as well as preserve your family heritage. Your family reunion should be a time of fun and games, intriguing storytelling, and sharing good food, which can seem tough to accomplish when planning your event during the chilly winter months. With a little imagination and planning, you can warm your winter family reunion right up and make it feel like a summer celebration. The following tips and tricks will get you started:

Jazz Things up With Color

The best way to brighten up your family reunion event space to make it feel warm and lively is to infuse a mood altering color scheme when you decorate. Whether you are using streamers and balloons or flowers and wall tapestries, color has the power to affect thoughts and feelings, which can effectively create plenty of enthusiasm during your event. You'll likely see fantastic results by using the following color options:

• Yellow – encourage excitement and invoke a sense of joy among the guests.
• Blue – help keep blood pressure levels low among all the party commotion, and provide a sense of calmness and relaxation.
• Orange – stimulate creativity and increase enthusiasm among both young and old party-goers.

Infuse some green into the event space too – it will help remind guests of the outdoors and increase peace of mind as the event unfolds. You can incorporate AstroTurf or another type of faux grass material into your interior design to create a park-like look and feel.

Plan a Few Sizzling Games

Since your family reunion is being held during the winter, it's likely that guests will primarily congregate inside. A great way to liven things up and turn your chilly event into a sizzling good time that will remind everyone of summer is to plan a few games that are typically played in the park. You may have to adjust the styles and rules of your chosen games to accommodate the size limits of your interior space, but everyone should still be able to capture the summer-themed essence of them. Consider implementing these ideas:

• Clap and Catch – Participating guests gather in a circle with one person standing in the middle. The person in the middle throws a sponge ball at random players making up the circle. The person chosen to catch the ball has to clap before doing so or they have to place a hand behind their back until they successfully catch the ball during a future turn. Once a player fails to catch the ball twice, they're out of the game – the last one standing wins!
• Treasure Hunt – Choose a dozen or so small items (think marbles, cotton balls, and dice) for guests to find around the event space and hide them before any guests arrive. Before starting the treasure hunt, print a list of all items that need to be found and provide a small clue for each one. Ask guests to team up in twos and start the hunt – whichever team finds the most items wins a small prize, such as family memorial photo albums.

In addition to physically active games, it's a good idea to incorporate coloring tables for the kids and card tables for the adults to enjoy when there is some downtime.

Prepare a BBQ Catering Menu

Nothing says summer like sharing a delicious barbecue meal with loved ones. Hiring a barbecue caterer for your winter family reunion is a sure fire way to ignite a summertime mindset that warms up everyone's minds and bodies. Barbecues are offer a casual feel, and most caterers are happy to set food stations up in a way that allows guests to eat and snack as they please throughout the event.

The food will likely make the entire event space smell like a summer picnic, even if the food is cooked in a different area than where the event is set to take place. And barbecue catering allows you to present a wide range of meats, salads, potato and pasta dishes, and finger foods that will meet the wide range of taste preferences among your guests.

Best of all, after you sit down to plan the menu for your event, your caterer will take care of everything else for you. With no cooking, cleaning, prepping, bussing, or dish roundup tasks to deal with, you can spend most of your time enjoying the loved ones who have gathered together to create a memorable day.

For more information about catering services, contact a company like Bassett Caterers.

These family reunion celebration ideas are sure to inspire an eventful occasion that everyone in the family will enjoy reliving through photos and memories for many years to come. 

10 February 2016