Si­mone Sant-Ghu­ran

Usu­al­ly most of the en­quiries I get from read­ers cen­tre around plan­ning, bud­get­ing, d�cor and at­tire. This week, how­ev­er, I re­ceived a ques­tion on bridal show­ers. But be­fore shar­ing the read­er's ques­tion with you, here's a bit of his­to­ry about bridal show­ers in gen­er­al.

The sto­ry goes that the bridal show­er tra­di­tion start­ed in Hol­land, when a Dutch girl fell in love with a poor miller. They mar­ried with­out hav­ing the ap­proval of the bride's fa­ther and as a re­sult, he with­held her dowry. The vil­lagers, to whom the miller had al­ways been char­i­ta­ble, "show­ered" the bride with items she would need to set up a home. It was around the 1890s when the Unit­ed States start­ed in­cor­po­rat­ing the tra­di­tion of the cou­ple's fe­male fam­i­ly mem­bers at­tend­ing a "show­er."

To­day, this pre-wed­ding ac­tiv­i­ty al­so in­volves the bride's friends as well.It usu­al­ly gen­er­ates much ex­cite­ment and an­tic­i­pa­tion for the bride and for in­vi­tees as well!Show­ers are de­signed to make the bride feel spe­cial, to give her mar­i­tal ad­vice be­fore the wed­ding, and to pam­per her be­fore the big day.

The read­er's ques­tion went like this: "Hi Si­mone, I'm throw­ing my sis­ter a "rat­ed PG" bridal show­er since my mom is at­tend­ing. Could you rec­om­mend some games please?"

Here are some ideas:

Fin­ish the bride's sen­tence

It's a great way to in­cor­po­rate the bride and give her some laughs! In this game, guests try to read the bride's mind as she says her phras­es or sen­tences. She can start by say­ing "On my hon­ey­moon, I wish I could..." or "I have al­ways dreamed of a white..."

Po­em game

In this game, the host­ess puts sev­er­al items on a tray. She then cov­ers it with a tea tow­el and di­vides every­one in­to pairs and shows the tray's con­tents to each pair at a time. The pairs each get a short amount of time to re­mem­ber the items they've seen and then they must write a po­em about the cou­ple, us­ing the items they re­mem­ber from the tray! The win­ning pair is the one who us­es the most cor­rect items.

Lip stick

Place an en­larged pho­to of the groom on a wall. Each guest gets a pair of cut-out pa­per lips with tape at the back and is then blind­fold­ed and spun around. The per­son must then try to stick the lips on the fu­ture groom's pic­ture; who­ev­er comes clos­est to his lips wins!

I dare you!

Each guest gets a list of items to col­lect or things to do dur­ing the course of the evening, such as: "talk to a stranger," or "eat some­thing raw!" Every­thing is worth points, which are tal­lied at the end of the show­er.

Sketch the bride

Each guest draws a pic­ture of the bride and then lists three things they like about her. As every one looks at the draw­ings, there are sure to be some hi­lar­i­ous mo­ments!

Don't say bride or wed­ding

At the be­gin­ning of the show­er, give each guest a clothes clip or safe­ty pin and then tell them that they are not to say the words "bride" or "wed­ding" dur­ing the show­er. If they break the rules, they may lose their pin to the per­son they are speak­ing to. The goal is for each guest to try to trick oth­er guests in­to say­ing those words! At the end of the show­er, the per­son with the most pins/clips wins.