Tammy Stoner, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, provides presentations, coaching and counseling services. As the developer of the Teddy Bear Technique® Toolkit she demonstrates fast and fun ways to engage in storytelling for adults and children, and quickly reach the hard to reach. As author, presenter and coach, services are guaranteed to create breakthrough results!
Top Ten Tips Tools and Techniques for
Delivering a Senior's Birthday Party
Would you like to have a birthday party for a senior and you don't know what to do? Are you struggling with how to create an event that touches, moves and inspires? If you answered yes to any of these questions, this article is for you. I was like you. I wanted to have a birthday party for my 70 year old father and I had no idea what to do. I suppose I could have organized the group to go out to a simple dinner with Dad and his children (he is divorced) as my brother Mark suggested, but I wanted to do something spectacular and that didn't cost much money. It had to be simple in price, luxurious in delivery! I created a phenomenal party and here are Tammy's Top Ten Tips, Tools and Techniques for creating a birthday party for a senior.
1. Organize around a theme. Family was the most important part of my fathers life and so I organized a family reunion around his birthday. I invited all of the relatives including nieces and nephews and cousins who were still living. It had been a hundred years since his family had entered the United States and the town in which he was born and now lived. This became a key theme.
2. Create a candle lighting ceremony. Candles are put on top of a birthday cake, while the guest of honor makes a wish and blows them out. So ho hum.... I wanted to move beyond this so I asked my brother Allen to create the candleabra with seven places to put a candle. We then created a ceremony celebrating different decades and different people with candles. We called it the gift of life candle lighting celebration. We acknowleged the relatives who made it to 70 and remembered those like his mother, brother and sister who did not.
3. Create a skit around the birthday. We didn't have much money for this event so the entertainment had to come from his children. Nobody had any talent to sing and we didn't have the money to hire expensive entertainment so I wrote a skit. We recreated his mother pregnant with him in 1935 and integrated this with the culture of 1935. All of us acted out the skit with costumes. We were poor actors and that added to the entertainment and fun.
4. Decorate in themes. We didn't have much money so we created the room to represent different decades of Dad's life. We had a table for the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's etc...
5. Give a million dollar bill and print the guest of honor's face on the bill. I took an old picture of Dad and reproduced it to be printed in a million dollar bill. Then we wrapped candy bars in this bill and gave them to the guests
6. Create a personalized birthday cake. I collected pictures of three generations. The family Dad originated from, Dad and the family he created. We then placed each picture on the birthday cake.
7. Give everybody a teddy bear. Teddy bears are symbols of attachment for people. So everybody was given a teddy bear to recognize and remember our attachments to others.
8. Create a personalized placemat. I organized all of the pictures I could find and copied the pictures and then placed them in a collage that I then laminated. I then created the created the placemat into a story and so the placemat became a take home gift for the guests. Dad framed his after the party.
9. Create copies of the pictures and give them to the guests. Many pictures were old. They were copied and made available for members of the family who wanted to have them.
10. Create a proclamation from the Mayor. People don't know this, but it's pretty easy to honor somebody as a citizen. Just write the mayor and write a list of accomplishments and the Mayor's office will create a proclamation, perfect for framing.
Reprint permission granted in part or whole when the following credit appears: Reprinted with permission from Tammy Stoner LCSW at
http://www.TeddyBearTherapy.com 1-770 639-7719
© Tammy Stoner @ The Teddy Bear Technique® All rights reserved.
Please contact us at uniqueidea@aol.com to discuss your situation and to schedule a free 30-minute consultation.
