Relief Society Birthday Garden Party

Lovely ideas for throwing a Relief Society Birthday Garden Party or any indoor Spring Themed Garden Party.

Last month marked the 175th Birthday of the organization of Relief Society. The Relief Society is the women’s group at the church I am a member of, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is actually the the largest and oldest women’s group in the world (you can learn more about it here).

Any and every birthday calls for a celebration, am I right?!

Originally we were planning something around a soup menu, but the breaded soup bowls my friend wanted were a little too spendy for the allotted budget. We decided instead on serving chicken salad. I was much happier about this because bread bowls seem so wintry and I was ready for spring!

To go along with the chicken salad and the change of weather, we decided to throw a Garden Party.

The Invites and Decorations

Using a template found in Paperlesspost (I go to them for all my online invitation needs), I emailed these flower invitations that fit perfect with our theme.

For our Relief Society Birthday Garden Party, I was envisioning elements of a tea party with flowers, doilies, and teacups. The three of us planning the event lacked most of those items.

But one can dream, right?

One Sunday, after announcing the Birthday activity, a sweet lady in our church volunteered to help. She supplied all the elements we were missing including all the lovely flower arrangements and took the party to the next level by providing beautiful mismatched china plates for everyone to use.

She happens to run her own event planning business, so in case you are planning a wedding in the Nashville area, be sure to check out her site Drakewood Farms.

There are several gorgeous free printables that fit perfectly with our garden themed party. I used two of my favorite printables “Bloom where you are Planted” and “Charity never faileth“.

By now you know that I am quite the fan of guestbooks. I designed this flower guestbook for the event and had each sister (that is what we call each other) sign a pedal as they arrived. It is now being displayed on our Relief Society bulletin board. 🙂

Do you like the guest book? I created an editable version that you can grab over here.

The Menu

Our menu consisted of chicken salad croissants, watermelon, grapes, strawberries and little pastries which were displayed beautifully on cake platters. To drink we had lemonade and water. Everything was delicious and … gone! Hindsight, we should have also served some type of veggie tray.

Relief Society Birthday Garden Party

The evening began with mingling, eating, and more mingling. We had a little message about the Relief Society history and “blooming where you are planted”.

-> If you need an activity to start the night off, check out this fun printable Relief Society game HERE or test your sister’s knowledge of Relief Society with these Trivia questions found HERE. 

We played a get-to-know you game that was similar to last’s years game, but with an added element of fun. To play, everyone is seated in a chair and all the chairs are arranged in a circle. There is one person who asks a series of yes or no get-to-know you questions. For example, “Have you traveled out of the country?” or “Have you had braces?” For every question someone can answer yes to, they move to their left. If the answer is no, they stay in the same seat. The game can go as long or as short as needed depending on how many questions are asked.

The humor in the game is, as you can imagine, with several people moving to the left and others staying seated, you start getting a little cozy with your neighbor. We asked 30 or so questions and towards the end we had quite the pile up! Please excuse the fuzzy picture, our photographer was laughing.

>> More fun Relief Society themed printable games in my shop!

Oh, and what’s with the hats? I find that by involving guests beforehand by asking them to dress up really enhances the ambiance (as seen here, here, and here). Since it was a garden party, I encouraged all to to wear a big hat or sun hat. I thought it added a fun element. 🙂

What a fun evening we had together! It was so uplifting to be around such valiant women who are actively engaged in doing good.

Did you find this post helpful? Then save THIS PIN to your Party Ideas board for later!

Check out this fun Relief Society game called “Find the Sister“!

Want more Relief Society Birthday celebration ideas? Check out this Italian Themed Party we threw last year.