Hosting a Virtual Bridal Shower

This weekend, we held a bridal shower for my soon-to-be-wed sister Lizzy--however, since Lizzy lives in the USA, and we live in Malaysia, this bridal shower was made possible by the power of technology!

In our part of the globe, we invited many of Lizzy's friends and the ladies who had watched her grow up to come to spend an evening celebrating her and chatting with her about her love story and plans for marriage. MaryGrace was the primary baker--spending most of Friday making three kinds of cookies and biscuits and all sorts of yummy treats. As usual, I prepped games, decor, and favors. On Saturday, the day of the party, we spent the whole day at a charity fundraising event, only returning home an hour before the party was due to begin. Thankfully, Mom had been at home during the day and had time to prepare the last-minute fruit and veggie snacks.

Lizzy and Anna called in promptly at 7--which was 7 in the morning, their time!

As guests arrived, they were instructed first to guess how many chocolate kisses were in this silver box (they were allowed to shake the box, but not to open it!), then they had to take a little toy ring to wear, and were told that if they said wedding or bride, anyone could ask them to give up their ring.

 

By strange coincidence, one lady guessed the exact number of kisses in the box, and she was the one who didn't know that you were allowed to lift the box or shake it, she'd just guessed, and happened to guess "77"! She certainly earned the prize of taking the whole box of kisses home! Also funny, we asked Anna and Lizzy to guess the number of kisses based on looking at the box, which must have looked really small in the video, because they guessed "25" and "18." Most of the guests here who shook the box were in the 80-100 range.

After guessing the number of kisses, we asked our guests to grab a plate of food--we always have a lot of food at our parties! And then they could sit down and chat with Lizzy for a bit. She told her entire love story--how they met, how he pursued her, how he proposed, and all those sorts of moments, which was really nice because, given the distance, not all of the women in her community here have been able to hear many of the details of their relationship.

Of course, we had to show all of the lovely food to the bride, who was eating soup for breakfast, and didn't get to share in tasting our yummy treats!

We had bought presents online, and also given Maid-of-Honor Anna some errands to run so that Lizzy had gifts to open during the party, but we also really enjoyed playing games. Because bridal showers are not particularly common in this culture, this was the very first bridal shower some of the guests had ever gone to--and they mentioned that they particularly enjoyed the games!

 One game we played was a version of "Mustaches and Tiaras," which involved asking the bride and groom to answer a list of questions ahead of time, then reading out the questions along with just one of the answers. Guests had to guess who gave that answer, the bride or the groom, and vote by raising either the mustache or the tiara--or BOTH, if they thought that the bride and groom might have had the exact same answer.

Another game we played was "Who Has the Groom?" I printed off a free version of the game and put cards into envelopes. The version I printed off had a variety of celebrity faces pasted onto cartoon tuxes, with a blank tux where I could add a photo of the real groom's face. I added a little bit of interest by writing famous movie quotes related to love on the outside of the envelopes, so everyone could read out the quote from their envelope before opening it, and they could try to identify the quote. After each envelope was opened that contained a celebrity (Brad Pitt or Justin Bieber, etc) our whole room would burst out laughing, but Lizzy wouldn't know exactly what we were laughing about, so each time we'd hold up the card with the "groom" on it and ask if this was the guy--some of her NO!s were especially vehement. I will admit I was starting to get nervous and was actually wondering whether I'd remembered to put the card with Joseph's face on it in an envelope when we made it to the very last guest before the real groom actually appeared. I was relieved when he showed up. :P

We took some time to all share our favorite relationship advice--even the youngest guests, including Sarah. I think MaryGrace's advice was one of my favorites: "Remember the importance of surprising someone...like giving them cupcakes!"

Cupcakes are good.

Have you been to a bridal shower lately? We enjoyed ourselves, and it was a great way for Malaysia to get to have its own role in celebrating her upcoming wedding! There's always a bright side to technology!