Getting ready for a retirement party

Have you ever managed a retirement party?

The one retirement arty that I remembered vaguely had an inflated shark floated in for personal value to the retiree. When time came to host one, it was lucky that there was a recent one hosted. I happened to walk with the soon to be retiree, near the decorated cube of the recent retiree. Out cam elist of favorite chocolated and color.

So the theme and chocolates to be strewn on the tables were set.

What people like the most?

All images in this post - party city

I happened to find some on Amazon which had more rows like Always, Never which I liked but that double this size. But when I found these, I thought they were cute. Atleast couple of people asked me where these were from. They came as a set of 25

My main pull to the patycity was this office decorating kit.

I know that there should be cake. That was easy. half sheet cake for 48. That is only true if you have a person excellent at doing that kind of portion cutting of cake. There were 2 sets of cupcakes from Walmart.

I should have probably spruced this centerpiece more for this effect.

Theme color napkins, plates, forks all brought beforehand

Cakes, Cupcakes, Coffee and balloons ordered prior and picked up on the day. 

I was very tempted to skip these, but the effect would have been amiss.

All in all, the total decorations (tablecloth), retirement advice cards and cutlery (plates, forks and napkins for 50 people) and chocolates (one kitkat bag, one hersheys bag and 5 hershey bars) came to about 100$ not counting cakes, cupcakes and coffee.

A friend suggested speech, I wrote the speech over the weekend, but didn thave time to practice it. It helped to have the computer to prompt me, in case I needed some egging on. Toastmasters experience of speech and managing events helped a lot. I was supposed to text a friend, which I forgot in frenzy. It was god nerves. The people came in and sat for a show. This made it easy for a speech setting. We had some photo props that were used as decoration in the cube until the party time. My favorite was the 'not retired' which I put against another colleague's cube. The way the gathering went, there was more talking than interest in taking pictures. Later when we took a group photo, we all had the props.

She also suggested music which all worked out very well. A music afficionado with musical instruments was our good bet. Then I recalled another friend saying that she was going to sing for a retirement party in her department. I pulled them together. At a very short notice, they practised. I roped in the retiree to sing too (hidden talent which I learned about recently at holiday party), which made for a memorable song experience for all. Music was even used at the beginning to get the attention of people. It worked.

The very creative friend also suggested a picture as a backdrop on the projector.

Created advice from the friend and logistics help in bringing coffee made it all fun.

Everyone was such a good sport. We all had lots of fun.