Superwomom: 60th Birthday - Ideas and Preparations

If you are going to hold a surprise 60th birthday party for your father, what would you do? I'll share with you what we have prepared for our Tatay Dan three years ago.

1. Select a theme.
Our Tatay like watching movies. We opt for a movie-themed birthday party.

Our main decors to set the theme

2. Draw up your guest list.
You need to draw the line between who's in or out.

Tatay's entrance and his guests

3. Get a venue.

We reserved this immediately. I think if you've sealed the deal with the venue, everything would be easy.

Pescadores' smaller function room

4. Make an invitation.
We made a simple invite made from Photoshop and printed at the UP Shopping Center. Don't forget to call people up to confirm their attendance.

5. Decide on your decoration.
We grabbed movie posters from Google images (we chose the ones with higher resolution), replaced the face of the actors with that of my Tatay's. We had these printed in tarpaulins. We hung them around the venue.

Tatay and him as King Arthur

This was a blessing in disguise. We had a booboo because we printed a whole batch of invites without an indicated time. Instead of throwing these, we just cutout the face of Tatay and glued these to barbecue sticks which we wrapped with ribbons. We made these as table accents. They turned out pretty neat.

6. Get good and reliable suppliers.
a. Food - Pescadores (Contact nos: 288-7720, 288-6296)

b. Photobooth - Partypics (http://www.partypicslive.com/)

c. Sound system and projector - CrossMix Lights and Sound (http://crossmixaudio.com/index.php/page/loadPage/1)

d. Cake - Estrel's (http://estrels.com/)

e. Photographer - Jikoy Photography (https://www.facebook.com/jikoyphotography?fref=ts)

7. Prepare a program.
Here's ours...
a. Prayer
b. Introduction
c. Play the Audio-visual presentation
d. Eating time/Photobooth time
e. Prep the guests for a game or two
- We had Tatay-related Pinoy Henyo
- We also played Name that Movie. We downloaded famous dialogues from youtube, played this without the video and let the guests name the title of the movie

f. Give the book (Grill the celebrant)
g. Ask some guests to give a message
h. Ask the celebrant for his thank you message
i. Start the videoke session

8. Special Mention: Book Tribute
On top of the surprise birthday lunch, we did a tribute through a DIY book tribute. We interviewed people close to my Tatay (his mom, siblings, kids, officemates), transcribed the interviews, collated relevant photos and made a photo book layout in Photoshop. We had this printed in LBC's Digiprint and gave this to Tatay on his big day.