Themed Birthday Speeches

by Amanda
(Wellington)

One of Gwen's quilts

Is the birthday party you are planning themed?

Why not theme your speech to match?

Let me explain and give the background to my questions.

We'd been planning a special party for a very special lady and wanted to find a theme. Finally, we realised the theme that was right for her was so obvious we'd overlooked it.

Gwen is a quilt maker and has been for many years. Her quilts are exquisite: each one unique and a triumph of careful color and cloth selection. We call them patient masterpieces because each one takes so long to make.

Now we'd got the theme sorted out, we set to work planning the invitations, decorations, food and so on. Then we got to the speech.

We realised we wanted that to be in keeping with the rest of the celebration so we decided to carry the theme of quilting or patch-working through.

The end result was a speech that talked about Gwen's life in blocks or patches. Each block or patch was stitched to the next to form her own ever-growing, beautifully patterned and richly colored quilt.

Because there are so many people who love and honor her, we decided not to have just one person delivering the speech. We quilted that too but to stop it from being a shambles we nominated one person to begin and end the process. And we rehearsed as well.

What happened was that Geoff (our opening and ending speaker) explained what we were going to do in his introduction and the rest of (the patches) took over, one after another.

It went perfectly. We had four themed blocks, Gwen's work as a social worker, her family - husband and children, a friends piece and her hobby, quilting.

Each person had about a minute to speak and then Geoff finished it off. We'd made a speech quilt between us, a fitting tribute for our friend and she loved it.

That got me thinking that with little bit of thinking lots of birthday speeches could be themed to go with whatever style of party had been planned. There could be speeches with holiday, movie, historical or hobby themes. The possibilities seem infinite, limited only by imagination.