Our Big Fat Disaster Graduation Party!

It is my duty to write this post to assist any poor people who may be attempting to plan a vintage emergency preparedness/disaster themed party. Surely I cannot be the only one. I found pinterest (and the rest of the world wide web) to be extremely unhelpful in the planning of Blake's grad party. I will pin this post so it will be a resource for you for time and eternity! If you have pinterest, help a stranger; pin it too!

Why the party?
Ever since Blake started college three years ago I knew I would throw him a huge party when he finished. It gave me something fun to work on while he spent the evenings doing homework. We had so many people we wanted to celebrate with! I knew I didn't want anything you'd find at a high school graduation party, but wasn't sure how to gear this type of a celebration to adults and their families. But I persevered and this is what I came up with.

Why the theme?
My first instinct was to do a woodsy beardy rustic lumberjacky theme for Blake (which makes sense if you know him). The problem is, the university he graduated from has a lumberjack for the mascot, and that's just too cheesy and expected for a grad party. Blake was studying to be an emergency manager, and that proved to be the inspiration for the focal point of the party: a disaster desserts buffet. Once I could envision a table covered in a lovely display of disaster desserts the rest of the party slowly came together. I knew I didn't want it to be a survival themed party so much as a disaster and preparedness themed event (I promise there's a distinction). It also wasn't going to be a fire/ems themed party. It was tricky trying to explain those exclusions to people. I ended up focusing it further into a sort of vintage emergency preparedness theme with the disaster desserts as a glorious highlight.

Where:
I ended up renting a party venue for the evening. I would have loved to have it outside, but Flagstaff is horrifically windy in the springtime and it frequently snows graduation weekend. I looked for a venue that would be basically a blank slate and found it at a fitness studio that doubles as an event venue. The party was in the evening.

Old crate for cards

Invitations:
I was thrilled with how the invites came out! I just did some doodling and came up with the general premise, then a friend who does graphic design created the finished product. She ordered them off vista print pretty cheap.

Food:
We served dinner at the party. It was more important to me that it tasted good and was fun than that it stuck with the theme. I also love DIY type entrees when guests get to build their own little something. Thus, we decided on a macaroni and cheese bar, with fun toppings! There was sausage, sauteed onions and mushrooms, little hotdogs, bacon, other vegetables, that sort of thing. We also had delicious little chicken sliders and a big tossed salad. Simple and crowd friendly! We got a lot of compliments on the food; a friend of mine is a caterer and did all the dinner and most of the desserts very affordably for me. We just had lemonade and water to drink. My favorite part was the Styrofoam takeout containers that people used instead of plates; we made labels for them that looked like MRE labels, to tie in the theme a little bit. They were really fun and easy! I just printed them on the sticky business card sheets from Office Max.

The start of the buffet

Decorations:
Decorations are not my strong point; I had an idea in my mind how I wanted things to look but I'm really rotten at bringing it to pass. I hired an event coordinator for the day (more on that later) and had help from our parents and a couple friends. They all did such a good job making it look nice! I ordered some vintage preparedness things off of ebay and ordered poster sized prints really cheaply off of snapfish of someWWII and Cold War era Civil Defense posters and placards. We also found a few things at the local military surplus store, and Blake got these amazing Cold War era sanitation barrels in the attic of the PD! I also made little preparedness quote posters. I made little "what is emergency management" signs in cute frames with pictures from the graduation ceremony from the day before in them. I am a sucker for cute favors at events but wanted them to be useful too; I ended up making containers of strike anywhere matches in baby food containers with sandpaper glued to the top. We scattered cards from the worst case survival game on the tables too in case anyone was amused by them; lots of people enjoyed them. I also ordered cute matching shirts for the kiddos. We had an area for kids to play in so they didn't have to sit with their parents the whole time if they didn't want to, with play tunnels and tents and balls and what not (crayons and bubbles were bad, bad ideas). As far as tablecloths and that sort of thing, we decided to do some tables with burlap runners and others with cutup maps. I like variety but also consistency :)

Baby girl in her awesome shirt!

Activities and Such:
I knew I wanted to engage our guests, but there were no obvious activities for an adult graduation party! After months of thought we decided prizes would be fun; who doesn't love a door prize? So everyone got a ticket as they entered (which also allowed Blake and me to greet all our guests). We drew fun preparedness themed prizes throughout the evening. We also taped some emergency ponchos under random chairs. We had several important thank you speeches to give, and Blake made a disaster themed playlist that we played all evening; I think it had around 15 songs on it. I really wanted to have a game of sorts that people could participate in as much or as little as they wanted. I spent months pondering ideas and ended up having to come up with it all on my own; all the tables competed for points against each other simply by answering questions and tallying up points (it was more fun than it sounds). They were preparedness type questions and were worth different amounts of points. One question was: Add three points if you can name three survival television shows. Add one million points if any of you have been on one." Blake's boss did SWAT for a long time in Vegas and was on a SWAT reality show a couple times. His table won a million points. It's never a bad thing for the boss's table to take home the prize! Blake had made paracord key chains for the people sitting at the winning table. One important thing: I hired an event planner to coordinate the whole evening for me so I could be by Blake's side and not running around like a crazy person. She discreetly made sure everything was happening on schedule, coordinated with the caterer, informed me when it was time to start the speeches and games, let me know when people were leaving...she was a life saver! She also helped set up and take down and was great at making my vision materialize in a way I am terrible at! I am so glad I got to enjoy the evening instead of running it.

Bash playing with a ball after the party

Bash tried to steal the show during the speeches

Friends playing the game!

Lucky winner of a door prize!

Dessert Buffet:
The main attraction! I saw lots of people taking pictures of the finished display, which made me feel so good! Blake also said it was the talk of the PD after the party :)
Once again, pinterest had nothing for me. Apparently "natural disaster dessert idea" is not a popular concept. I considered probably a dozen ideas before settling on nine for the display, thinking about a variety of flavors and types: 1. Tsunami cupcakes 2. Avalanche bars 3. Landslide parfaits 4. fire cupcakes 5. pandemic cookies 6. Bugle tornado mix 7. Killer bee pretzels 8. Volcano cake 9. Famine (just a plate with crumbs on it, haha). I made the labels on a template I found my googling custom hazmat labels or something like that.
We kept the table roped off with caution tape until we officially invited guests to enjoy it after our speeches. It turned out so great!!

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Things I wanted to do but didn't:
Other things I hoped to do but wasn't able to or decided not to for various reasons include having a sandbag tossing contest, incorporating a pinata because pinatas are awesome, having printouts as seismographs as table runners, and using a megaphone like all good emergency managers do :)

The party was so much fun! It was a terrific way to celebrate Blake's and his accomplishments and thank our friends and family for their support over the past three years. Now go and throw disaster parties of your own!!!