| Reunion Souvenirs | Do you like? |   Thank you! |
You'll want to remember the fun of your reunion through some sort of special family souvenir. Some nifty items that can be personalized include t-shirts, bandanas, water bottles, photo albums, picture frames, baseball caps, sweat shirts, and koozies. Just make sure you choose an item that can be enjoyed by both males and females.
| Family Photo | Do you like? | Thank you! |
You might want to have a photo made of the entire clan. You'll need to secure someone outside the family to take the picture. You can all pile in cars and go to a professional studio or you can hire a professional or novice to come to your location to take the shot. Consider wearing coordinating outfits for the photo, not necessarily matching ones. For instance, everyone could wear khaki pants, shorts, or skirts, and the women could wear light blue polo shirts while the men wear dark blue ones. Or each family within your large family could wear a different colored shirt.
| Capture the Moment | Do you like? | Thank you! |
Have a plan for taking pictures of your family gathering or you'll say your goodbyes and either have too many pictures or too few. Designate one to three people to take pictures of the event, encouraging them to get both impromptu and posed shots of everyone there. At the end of your reunion have the designated photographers get together and compare their photos (if they have digital cameras) and cull through them, weeding out duplicates. Or they can have all pictures developed at a nearby one-hour developer and sort through those. Individuals and families can then look through the pictures and decide which ones they want copies of. Make copies at the local developer or have digital copies sent to everyone via e-mail.
| How to get honest evaluation of reunion | Do you like? | Thank you! |
You'll want to ask people to give you their honest opinions about the reunion in order to plan an even better one next time, but it's difficult to get the unvarnished truth if you ask face-to-face or even ask people to write or email, because those methods all involve them revealing who they are. Typically they won't want to hurt your feelings or appear to be ungrateful for all the work you have put into the reunion. The way to get honest evaluations is to provide a way for them to be anonymous. The easiest way is for you to prepare a short questionnaire in advance, asking questions that don't require a big effort to answer, such as Yes/No, but always add a section labeled "Remarks or Suggestions and leave enough space for them to write the suggestions in. Hand the sheet out before the reunion breaks up. Be sure to indicate you don't want any identifiers -- no name, etc. and provide a box for them to deposit the sheet. This way, you'll get a big enough number of answers that you can really find out what most attendees thought. 0
| Souvenir Book | Do you like? | Thank you! |
After you've taken a load of pictures at your reunion what should you do with them? Check out the professionally bound photo books you can make using your pictures at
www.shutterfly.com. This web site provides you with an excellent place to share your pictures with others, order prints, or create a polished memory book using your photos and words.
| Recipe Book | Do you like? | Thank you! |
Most families are pretty proud of their cooks. If you have some super cooks in your family and some favorite family recipes, now is the time to put together that cookbook you've all been talking about for years. Have each family cook send their special recipes to a designated "cookbook editor" in the family. That person can put the books together before the big event so they can be purchased at the reunion. A good resource for putting together such a book is Cookbook Publishers, Inc. You'll find their website at
www.cookbookpublishers.com.
