I’ve now been married to my lovely wife, Avery, for over 5 years! I’m so thankful for her and for our marriage.
We decided to throw a party in celebration of this milestone with some of our friends at our apartment in NYC. We made it more unique using a theme + technology!
Attire and vibe
We wanted this to feel more special than a usual hangout for ourselves and our guests. We decided that we should have optional semi-formal attire and went with a 1920’s-esque theme.
We used this theme in our e-invitations (created using evite), for the music (big band playlists like these), for the drinks (we fixed a large batch of Manhattan cocktails), and for the welcome + intro animation.
Welcome + instructions animation
I wanted to create something that made the event stand out a little and also direct guests to the activities, especially as people were arriving. I created this anniversary party welcome / instructions animation that I had playing on our TV:
See the Pen Anniversary party welcome / announcement by Zach Saucier (@ZachSaucier) on CodePen.
AI-generated image activity
As an activity, I had my laptop out and had guests use Midjourney to create an AI-generated image for us. I provided some basic instructions alongside the Discord server that is used to generate the images.
This went over very well! Particularly with our friends who are not as tech savvy. They were blown away with how fast you can generate images and spent extensive time trying to recreate some of the people in the group. For example:
We also got a wide range of other images, including some elephants carrying flowers, a rat mafia, golden retrievers in Sheep Meadow, and even a Lisa Frank Jesus!
I highly recommend this activity for groups that are casually hanging out!
A “how well do you know your partner” game
We wanted this party to not just be comprised of a single friend group of ours but include people from multiple groups. However, our apartment is small and we had to choose some way of filtering people.
Our solution was to invite couples from all of our friend groups! That restriction also let us do a couples activity: a “how well do you know your partner” game that is commonly done at wedding showers and things like that. Since we had all couples there, we made it more interesting by having everyone play and keep score!
I created a set of questions along with a handout ahead of time.
Avery and I were about middle of the pack in terms of our score but basically on the same page with all of our answers, which is good.
Looking forward to many more anniversaries and celebrations
I love getting people together and also empowering people to be more creative. This party happened to do both of those things while also being a blast!
God willing, there will be many more anniversaries and other celebrations to come where we can do more things like this!