Birthdays - Party & Gifts
 One of the most difficult parties to plan is that of a surprise party, especially if the recipient of the party lives with you or is a frequent visitor. It is for these reasons that it may be easier to plan to hold a surprise party at a place where the recipient will least expect it. If you are planning a rather elaborate celebration that requires renting a hall, it will be much easier to keep it a secret but more difficult to devise an excuse for the party recipient to attend. If you plan to use a venue away from your residence, you want to make sure you devise your excuse before you plan the party.
If you’re planning to have the party at the recipient’s home, it will take some skillful planning to get him or her out of the house so that you can decorate and await the arrival of the guests before bringing the birthday person back into the house. One possibility is to have a close friend or family member invite your party guest out for the afternoon of the party so that you can prepare. You don’t want to make it too obvious, so if you have a friend or neighbor who is willing to store the food for you until the day of the party, it would surely save you some time. You will then have everything completed when the party guest arrives from his or her afternoon out enjoying some birthday activities. If you’re having a surprise party at a venue or someone else’s home on a Saturday, it’s much easier to find an excuse for leaving the house - at least for a female. You work all week and tend to use Saturdays to run all of your errands, so your spouse or partner would not find it out of the ordinary if you left the house early on Saturday morning and didn’t return until late afternoon. The only problem might be to find an excuse to get him to leave the house so that you can finish the preparations. If you finished everything in the afternoon, or you have help from the house that is staging the event, it might be as simple as telling him that you are taking him out to dinner for his birthday but need him to help you pick something up from “Mary’s” before you go to the restaurant. Surprise parties are a great deal of fun, but they do take more work than your average birthday party since there is so much secretiveness if you are to prevent the recipient from finding out what you are planning. It is definitely much easier to plan a surprise party for someone who doesn’t live in your home than it does for your spouse, siblings, or children who live with you. If you decide to host a surprise party, do make sure you can enlist the help of others so that you will be able to pull it off without any problems. |