Another (yes there’s more) hobby of mine which also happens to involve many of my other favourite hobbies (like organising/planning, art’s & crafts and dress up) is hosting parties. If there’s a few things I’m known for (my love of food usually the first people learn), throwing extravagant parties is definitely one of them.
permission to party
Growing up, my mums gift to me for my birthday each year was the permission to throw a party in her house. Even as a child, this is what I wanted most. No toys, no presents, just a party. Actually my mum likes to tell people a story about when I was child and I actually used left over invites from one of my sister’s friends party’s [back in the day when it was a written invitation] and handed them out to people at school without even letting my mum know. She didn’t have the heart to tell them that this “party” that i invented wasn’t a real thing, so she just let me have it anyway. Bless her and my sisters for helping me with games and entertainment!!
When I was a teen and the guest lists got bigger and things started getting more expensive, I would use my birthday savings from the previous year to fund the following and also ask my sisters to assist as their gift to me. I was very lucky and I am very grateful. I wasn’t very grateful at the time being young and dumb and selfish but as I’ve grown older and looked back, I am now.
picking a theme
Its so fun throwing a party, dressing up and decorating but the thing with having a theme is, not everyone is into dressing up. And for my party to be complete, I need you to dress up. So every year when I come up with a new thing, I have to take the people who cringe and don’t want the attention of being noticed (or who are just lazy) into consideration. I have to pick one for the folks who refuse to make an effort, can still chuck on something without feeling like they’re going out of their way and will still rock up looking like they’re part of the fun.
For example, UV party was super easy. For anyone who didn’t have anything that glowed, I told to dress up in white (therefore would still glow under the UV lights). Easy. Everyone has something white. I actually ended up breaking some glow sticks throughout the night and sprayed some colour love on peoples white’s anyway, oops… Another example is my last Matrix party. This one was in Winter (my bday isn’t in Winter but long story…) so asking people to wear leather and trench coats was not surprisingly hard.
I know to work with my crowd. When I was living in Singapore, most of my friends there were performers and a couple Martial Artists so the Kimono theme wasn’t too much to ask for. I would’ve loved to have decked out the place a little better with the theme and originally I wanted to book a chalet and do it up but this was in Feb ‘2020 (still not my birthday, but long story…) so it was when Covid was starting to hit Asia pretty bad and most chalets were actually being used as quarantine centres for people returning from overseas.
my parties through the ages
So until I feel the guests I am going to invite are at the point in our lives where they’re willing to put in some effort, I’ll stick to the easy stuff. But my goodness, I await the day I have a house big enough to fit a hall room and I can pull off a legit masquerade ball, and finally complete my 9 year old Shaks’ dream party (I actually had a “masquerade” 9th bday – not a ball but everyone did rock up in masques and I also made a few spare ones in case people didn’t comply and would ruin the theme. Just realising not much has changed in my personality since then…
I’ve done a scavenger hunt party, coming up with riddles and making clues for people to solve and spreading them throughout my house. Everyone ended up joining in as a team instead of competing against one another and we all discovered the end prize together. I don’t remember what it was but I imagine just a bunch of lollies or something. Most my parties as a kid involved a lot of games. My two sisters were quite a bit older than me so it made it easy having my very own hosts. There was always games and prizes and a piñata.
When I hit the high school transition stage between child and teen, my parties no longer had games but instead I asked for a DJ to play music and since I didn’t have a pool or anything fun to entertain guests, I actually hired a Spiderman jumping castle (I love spidey).
The first year a theme started falling into play was just based on my love for decorating and feeling creative. I also had a close friend who just started a baking business (yeah at about age 15, she’s still killing it to this day) and she offered to bake my cake. So I went with a black, white and red theme. I decorated the candy table as such, had a tower of red cups (because every teen wants red cups at their party pfft) and my closest friends and I wore B&W and also matched the cake.
The next year was tie-dye themed and this party was so dumb and I will look back and laugh at it until I die. Not because of the theme, the theme was awesome. But at this point I had been two 3 different schools, danced after school, had a job and was involved in church. So the guest list was so huge I had one sister and boyfriend checking off people names as they came in and another sister and her boyfriend literally tagging people’s bags at the front room of the house and cloaking it for the night. It was hilarious.
Each year the parties get better, I get better at planning and it has now become a fun yearly art project and I guess birthday present for myself! I am already thinking about my next theme and excited for the preparation to begin. I’ll go into more depth about the past themes I’ve done in another blog.
S