Our take on a Chinese New Year (CNY) Celebration Party

1. Theme
The traditional colour of CNY is red as it is a very auspicious colour. We decided to stick to 3 colours of red, yellow and white (a base colour to neutralise the bright colours).

2. Invitation
Using nostalgic photos provided by the family, we started them on a ‘Guess Who’ game right from the first stage when sending out invitations. Every of the 30 guests received a postcard-sized invitation with a different portrait of a childhood photo (of random family members) on each invitation. The guests were intrigued and were very excited to find out who was on their invitation card during the party. The invitation created a positive vibe to the party where everyone has the photos as a conversation-starter; it became an unusual form of CNY gathering and brought the family members together to understand each other better.

3. Ambience & Decor
We decorated the party venue (which was held at a private residence) with traditional Chinese paintings, lanterns created from ang-baos, cut-outs of various auspicious Chinese words, poems and sayings, and also red, yellow and white balloons. In addition, we created posters made out of more nostalgic photos given to us as a resource, to create a familiar and coherent theme. We created a giant billboard with portraits of everyone’s ‘Then and Now’ photos, and every guest had an opportunity to write a message to each other on the billboard. We also made a video montage which put together every guest’s wishes for the family which made a wonderful memory for the family’s keepsake.

4. Food & Beverages
The family had many young guests who requested for a different kind of CNY meal. Thus, apart from having the traditional steamboat, we had a Fusion buffet menu created for the younger generations. Collaborating with our caterer, we especially ordered in ingredients imported from Taiwan to create unique CNY dishes for the family, such as 貢丸湯 (pork balls soup), 魷魚羹 (cuttlefish thickened soup), 魯肉飯 (stewed pork rice), 菜脯卵 (white radish omelette) and 芋仔冰 (taro dessert). We also created phoenix and dragon carvings made out of carrots to add a wonderful touch to the food decorations. To the family, they regarded tasting new cuisines very auspicious to kick off the New Year and the unique menu added a great cheer to the party.

5. Entertainment & Games
For entertainment, we rented and set-up a Karaoke system for the entire night, including a wide selection of English, Chinese and Hokkien songs which the family thoroughly enjoyed. At the family’s request, a lion dance troop was brought in at 8pm (the most auspicious time of that evening) to ‘bring in’ luck to the family. Wrapping up the event, we revealed the answers to the ‘Guess Who’ game and gave an ‘auspicious gift bag’ (which includes chocolate ingots, many sweets, and a Singapore Sweep ticket in an ang-bao) to every guest.