Life, Parties / December 7, 2018

How to Throw a Successful Surprise Party

Last weekend, I threw Tom a surprise party for his twenty-sixth birthday. I had the plans in mind for the last five months or so, but officially started planning it about two months in advance. Keep reading to hear about my tips on how to throw a successful surprise party without the secret slipping out! 🙂

So first things first is sending out the invitations. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is through Facebook. Create a Facebook event and make sure it is set to secret so only those invited can see the event. Also make sure that “guests can invite others” is turned off, just to be on the safe side. You wouldn’t want someone accidentally inviting someone who sucks at keeping secrets or heaven forbid, the guest of honor themselves! If you know you need to invite someone who is terrible at keeping secrets, give them a bit less notice. It kind of sucks, but hey, you don’t want the surprise to be ruined. Make sure nobody slips to that person either. Invite them about 2 weeks out and you should be good. Another thing I do is put a disclaimer saying that I will come after anyone who spoils the surprise at the top of the “info” section. Haha! It’s kind of extra, but hey… I really don’t want the surprise ruined. I also include info like where to park (so their cars aren’t seen by the guest of honor) and what time to show up. For those not on Facebook, invite them via text message, but make sure they have all the same details from the Facebook event and that they know it is TOP SECRET. I set my party for 6pm with plans for Tom to show up around 7pm. This created a bit of a problem… More on this later.

The next part of this whole thing is setting up an excuse. Sometimes this includes another person who acts as the distraction and helps bring the guest of honor to the party. For my party, I told Tom I had a surprise activity planned for us and that I had reservations for at 7:30pm, but that he should get to my place around 7pm and come inside first to drop off his stuff. He was so convinced we were doing an activity! I really had to stick with the lie (this part was hard). It can get tempting to let the secret slip, but you have to stick with it and be believable! Just a few days before the party, he guessed if the activity was indoor skydiving. He was WAY off! Don’t worry, we will be going indoor skydiving later to make up for his guess.

Here’s another little pro tip: when buying your decorations, start at the Dollar Store. I bought my white and red streamers there, the “CELEBRATE” silver balloons hanging above my window (seen below) and the silver paper plates. I then went to Party City and got the balloons (including the “26” balloons), the pinwheel hangings, and confetti. I just wanted to mention this, because Party City is great, but you should always start with the Dollar Store, because you can find some great stuff for the party dirt cheap there! I would hate if I did Party City first and found the same thing for $1 afterwards.

So, y’know how I said my times set created a bit of a problem? In my ideal world, everyone would’ve shown up at 6pm or earlier, and Tom would’ve shown up at 7pm. Well, pretty much everyone (including Tom) threw a wrench in my plans! Part of planning a surprise party includes rolling with the punches. Learn from my mistakes, folks! If you set a time for guests, expect them to be thirty minutes late (no matter how many times you post in the group that they need to be on time or text you if they’re going to be late) and apparently, you need to plan on the guest of honor being early, haha. That’s exactly what happened to me! My guests didn’t show up until 6:30pm and Tom was going to be showing up around 6:40pm. I was NOT prepared! Guests continued rolling in until 6:45pm (Tom ended up showing up around 6:58pm) and I was counting on them to help me decorate. Because Tom was going to be early, I was pretty much in full on panic mode. I assigned everyone a task. I had one friend icing the cake, a group of three blowing up balloons with the helium tank and tying ribbons around them, another group of three hanging streamers and my little pinwheel hanging decorations, and another friend signed for the Pizza (Protip: Always be prepared to have food for the party guests while they wait for the guest of honor to arrive. I was going to put one pizza in the warming drawer of the oven, but Tom came so quickly that I didn’t need to). My saving grace was Tom’s mom. I had told her about the party about a month in advance and she was the one who told me he left early. I texted her back panicking about him arriving early (at this point, I only had one guest at my apartment) and she was able to call him back home and make up some excuse favor she needed help with. This bought me about fifteen to twenty minutes (which Tom wasn’t happy about at the time… whoops) and everything worked out in the end!

You should plan on doing something grand for the entrance. First thing’s first, since my door has a window with blinds on it, I stepped outside and asked friends to stand in front of the door to gauge what I could see from outside (gotta make sure he’s not surprised until he opens the door). In this case, I planned on throwing confetti. I bought a ton of confetti. Everyone got handfuls and we threw it at him when he came in the door! Sure, it took forever to vacuum up and I will probably keep finding glittery confetti around my apartment until I move out, but hey, it was worth it. Other options are throwing streamers (which I did at another surprise party I had last year, but that unfortunately scared my friend, haha, sorry Shelby!) or using silly string. Someone threw me a surprise party once with silly string and it was super fun, but I remember how hard it was for them to clean it up afterwards (it kind of hardened onto surfaces). One other option would be big paper confetti. Basically like wide cut streamer pieces. I’ve done that before and it’s way easier to pick up and since it’s paper, it still falls slowly so it looks great for pictures. This brings me to my next point! Have a designated photographer and designated videographer. I asked my friend Shelby to take video with my phone and I asked my friend Spencer to take pictures on his phone. It worked out great!

After Tom was sufficiently surprised, everyone mingled for about twenty minutes while eating pizza. Then we had Tom blow out the candles on his cake and we all ate cake! Tom opened his presents and then we spent the rest of the night playing tabletop games like What Do You Meme or Utter Nonsense. I provided alcohol as well (having a bar cart is so beneficial when hosting parties) so everyone had a drink or two as well throughout the night. Overall the night was super fun and Tom was so surprised and pleased!