Hen Party Tasks and Ideas: What a Bride Needs

My hen night  was truly delightful. Unfortunately, when two years ago a friend of mine asked me to be her maid of honour, I couldn’t repeat the perfect wife’s qualifying exam  because she had been present at my party and wouldn’t have a surprise. Before I tell you what I came up with, I am going to describe hen party tasks of my college friend, which were a great source of inspiration to me.

Spoiler alert! If you are getting married soon, don’t read further,
but share the link to this post with the organiser of your hen night.
Otherwise you won’t have a surprise!

All participants met in a park. To begin with, we painted the nails of the future bride: each a different colour. Then, we stuck a flower in her hair, and – instead of a typical veil – topped it with a straw hat, which was perfectly suitable for the fine weather that indulged us that day.

Hen party tasks in a park

In the park, the bride-to-be had to complete two tasks. The first one consisted in hammering nails of various sizes in a breadboard in the shape of a heart; in the second she had to separate poppy seeds from sand grains in a small box. To make things harder for her, at the same time she had to recount how she met with her future husband and how he proposed to her. Doing both tasks, she proved how creative and practical she was. The nails could have been hammered in any way and in any place, yet she arranged them in a meaningful shape. The seeds and the grains, in turn, could have been separated one by one, but my friend managed to do it quicker by shaking the box.

Hen party tasks in a pub

When it became colder, we moved into a pub nearby, where
we had a private room booked. That is where my friend was asked a series of questions about her fiancé and their relationship and tried to guess his answers. She was correct in most cases, and had only minor problems when asked about her signature dish (according to him) and about his favourite beginning of the day. Next, she had to recognise the body parts of her fiancé by looking at eyes, noses and hands cut out from photographs of various men.

That’s where the part planned by the organisers ended, and the thing that I enjoyed most about this particular hen party started. Namely, the participants ceased to be passive observers, and put their own ideas into practice.

Hen party tasks prepared by participants

My favourite task was a “job interview”. I was surprised that a candidate applying for the post of a wife may be asked exactly the same questions that may be heard during a typical recruitment process. E.g. You may ask her with a stony face how she sees herself in 5 years, or laugh out loud when she tries to explain what her prior experience in similar roles looked like. Above all, however, she needs to be warned that if she takes the job, she will have to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (bank holidays included), without a paid leave and for remuneration only in kind!

Another creative idea involved pieces of paper with good advice inserted in balloons filled with air. Theoretically, the advice could have been written down on a single sheet and framed, but piercing balloons in order to read the advice out loud made the party more rollicking.

During the last highlight of the evening, prepared by me, my friend had to tell us about her future married life on the basis of randomly matched sentence beginnings and endings. It was a challenge to come up with enough matching funny endings and beginnings specifying the time or the frequency of events, but it was worth it. Owing to me, the bride found out that she would give birth to triplets every time she came back from work!

Presents

Finally, we gave her presents, at which point the party organisers deserved to be praised once again. Apart from a plain nightcap and nightgown from the times of Jane Austen (my friend is a great fan of her), there was a present prepared by all participants. About a month before the party, the maid of honour asked us to submit tested cooking recipes for a good start of the married life, which she then compiled into a single cookbook. It’s hard to tell how many times the newlywed wife has used her new “night dress”, but a set of recipes accompanied by contact information in case something didn’t work out surely is priceless.

Next Monday comes the last post about hen parties although I could write much more about various games, presents and attractions related to them. Yet if I did, I’m afraid I would have to change the name of the blog from “My Creative Presents” to “My Hen Parties”. Therefore, I decided to content myself with describing the most memorable ones. Nevertheless, I would be grateful if you recounted your own experiences in the comments below, and thus created a database of ideas that could be used by others!

My advice:

– If the weather is fine, the outdoors hen party tasks may be expanded into a treasure hunt, similar to the one my best friends organised for my 18th birthday.

– The game testing the knowledge of the future husband is a popular element of hen parties. Its success depends to a large extent on the invention of the interviewers. I am going to attach a file with example questions to the next post. However, I would love to add more funny and unexpected questions to it, and I am counting on you to help me!

– During the fortune-telling with sentence beginnings and endings, someone should take the pieces of paper from the excited bride-to-be and clip them together. This way she won’t need to recall them from memory if she wants to retain them as a keepsake.