Coordinating Themes and Outfits for Your Family Reunion
Finding time for your family is important, and summer is the perfect opportunity to set aside that time to see those family members you don’t get to see very often. If you have a family that is somewhat scattered around the country or around the world, a family reunion is a wonderful excuse to see each other again. You may consider wrapping your reunion around another family event, such as a wedding, or you may just go for it!
Whatever you decide to do, you know you will want to make it a fun, memorable gathering. An easy way to do this is to have a theme! This gives a mental focal point to your party, and it gets people involved, especially if everyone gets to dress up! Here are some ideas for family reunion themes and fun outfits to make your celebration interesting and enjoyable!
1) Welcome to the Circus
Who would have fun at a circus? Your family, that’s who! This theme calls for bright colors and funky fair foods like candied apples, funnel cakes, corndogs, and more! If you want some healthier options, go for kebabs packed with vegetables. The games practically invent themselves. Grab some face paint and a beginner’s face paint handbook for those artistic members to enliven the party. Rent a bounce house so the kids can have hours of entertainment. Try bobbing for apples or a race to see who can eat a hanging doughnut sans hands first!
Depending on how large your family is, you can put on a show with the individual families creating their own acts. This helps draw people into the atmosphere and helps people decide on the outfits they want. Maybe yours is the Clown Family, and you need brightly colored, durable kids’ jeans so your committed kids don’t ruin their clothes during the act. Perhaps you have a lion tamer and a little lion doing tricks. A red men’s blazer and a top hat will be important for your show. If yours is the balancing act on a slack line, yoga pants might be necessary to truly demonstrate your skills. Whatever you end up wearing, remember to bow to the audience at the end of your performance!
2) Insert Your Sport Here
Sports and our favorite teams bring us together. We watch in awe of the athletic capabilities of some of the most gifted humans in the world. Take this idea and use it to make your family reunion a total blast! If your family loves football, go for a tailgate party, complete with cold soda, barbecued meats, and dips for days. Everyone should come wearing a favorite player’s jersey or a T-shirt in team colors. Watching a game might be fun, or you can organize a family-friendly game of two-hand touch.
If your family loves all sports equally, consider an Olympics-themed reunion! Pick three to five sports to play, or obstacle challenges to time, and see how the families score against each other. You can even create mini versions of the adult games for the kids or have tag team courses where different ages are matched together. Make sure to bring athletic shorts and shoes to this event so you can have the freedom to complete with the best of ’em!
3) Let’s Go to the Movies
Movies can give fantastic ideas for party themes! If there is a particular movie or series your family grew up on, recreate it for the next generation, complete with costumes, character food favorites, and games like, Who Said It? where you try to figure out which classic lines belong to which characters. Try to guess each other’s favorite clips from the movie. Have a costume contest with prizes for everything from the best costume or group costume, the most creative costume, and the most obscure character reference costume.
If there isn’t a family favorite, have each family choose its own movie from within a genre or a movie your family likes. Make it a wild potluck with dishes from each movie scrambled together for a fun food experience. Guess each family’s movie and chat about your different choices. Then have each group act out a famous scene and score each performance with points for line memorization, comedy, drama, and commitment to character. Watching a movie all together might be a lovely way to end this kind of family reunion.
Family reunions reconnect us. They remind us of childhoods, they give us the chance to tell family stories and pass down family traditions, and they strengthen the familial relationships and ties that can sometimes fall by the wayside if you aren’t close to each other. Making your family reunion memorable and fun with themes, food, and costumes can give you common ground again and be a wonderful way to revive a loving familial network.