Family Reunion Messages & Ideas

A family reunion gives relatives a chance to come together and spend time with one another. Reunions are especially significant when members of the family do not live close by. To make your family reunion all the more special, come up with messages and ideas for everyone to participate in that will help strengthen the familial bond.

Your family reunion may take place only once a year, or less frequently than that. As such, it is important that everyone has memories to take home with them. One idea is to hire a professional photographer to take pictures of the group for a day. The photographer can get candid shots of families participating in activities, cooking, eating and just sitting around talking. Whoever is in charge of the coordinating with the photographer can send out the pictures to everyone in the family so that each relative can remember that special day. If a professional photographer is not in the budget, have a member of the family be in charge of manning the camera. You might even have a photographer in the family who is willing to take on this project.

At your reunion, set out a blank journal where relatives can write messages. This becomes the message book. If your reunion is spanning over a weekend, each day you can have a new topic for the message book, such as "Things I love about my family," and "What I miss most about my relatives." Individuals are encouraged to write down their thoughts. Towards the end of the reunion the message book can be passed around so that everyone has a chance to read the messages.

Scavenger hunts are exciting for children and adults, so they make great activities for family reunions. Start by figuring out the teams, such as young cousins on one team, aunts and uncles on another. The scavenger hunt items should be relative to the reunion, so items may include things like an old photograph of grandpa, a secret family recipe and Uncle Joe's middle name. The winning team can receive a small prize.

A poem circle is an activity where family members take time to write a poem about their family. One by one, relatives go around the circle and share their poem with the rest of the group. Poems can be silly or serious. If you know that the relatives in your family are not the poetry-writing type, another way to send a family message is for the organizer to write or select a poem about the family and read it to everyone at the beginning or end of the reunion.

Souvenirs are memorable and sentimental tokens that relatives get to take away with them after the reunion. The souvenirs should be the same for everyone, and be related to the reunion theme or the location where you had the reunion. Have souvenirs engraved, if you can, to say something like "Family Reunion, 2011." That way, everyone remembers that exact time in their lives.