10 Steps to Planning a Surprise Party for Your Husband's 40th Birthday
There is actually only one step: Have an Anna in your life.
Step 1: Make an awesome invitation and text and email it to everyone your husband has ever known.
You secured a venue for the party, so now it’s time to invite people to come.
Once you begin this step, you will realize that your husband knows a lot of people and some of the most meaningful people in his life are people who are extremely offline and you have no contact info for. This will require a good bit of texting people you do have contact info for to get numbers for those other people.
Almost no one will RSVP at first, and there are many people out of town who can’t come. You anticipated this, so you ask out of town friends to film a short birthday message. Throwing a surprise party is easy!
Step 2: Remember you don’t have video editing skills.
Almost no one sends videos right away, which is fine, because you don’t know how to make a bunch of videos into one long video. You’ll ask one of your husband’s best friends to help, and he will agree. He’ll say he needs the videos by about two weeks before the party, so you’ll set a reminder to stop collecting videos on July 15th.
Step 3: Find a way to make sure your husband doesn’t plan anything for the night of the party.
You have a very busy life and an especially busy summer. You check in with one of his best friends (the same one making the video), who said he’d be able to come down for the party. This is where the lying begins. Video friend tells your husband he will be traveling through town at the beginning of August and needs a place to crash. This is plausible because he lives in northern Georgia and his wife has family in Florida. Your husband mentions this to you and puts it on the calendar.
Step 4: Spend many weeks not doing anything for the party.
It is now about two months until the party. You’ve sent all the invitations and reminded people about the videos but there is still a lot of time. Also, summer has begun and you’re going to be out of town or on vacation/staycation for seven straight weeks.
Step 5: Reach one month until the party and realize half the people haven’t RSVP’d and almost no one has sent videos.
The spreadsheet you made to track who is coming is a complete mess. Many people said they’d send videos, but only one person has. Video friend needs the videos in two weeks.
Step 6: Spend a week frantically checking for RSVPs and asking people from out of town to make videos.
You write a form text/email/message and go down your spreadsheet of out-of-town friends, texting everyone and giving them a deadline of July 15. You try to start asking local friends if they’re actually coming and get a lot of “maybes.”
Step 7: Have a meltdown a few minutes before a friend texts to ask how you’re doing, and then humbly accept this friend’s offer to help.
It’s now three weeks until the party. After realizing you are having a meltdown, your friend Anna tells you to come over and you sit at a table, her with notebook and pen, while you dictate your ideas for the party and what needs to be done and she asks clarifying questions. Anna is now your party planner. By the end of the afternoon, Anna has offered to go through the list of everyone who hasn’t RSVP’d and text them, make 100 red velvet cupcakes with her mom, enlist her sister to help paint a banner, calculate the amount of food needed, and send you reminders until the party about what you need to do (mostly, keep collecting videos). You now owe a life-debt to Anna. Anna is Han Solo and you are Chewbacca.
Step 8: Spend all your spare time when your husband won’t get suspicious hounding people for videos.
Thankfully, the weekend after the meltdown, your husband is going out of town. While you and the kids watch a movie you contact many of the same people again and tell them you need the videos in five days.
People finally start sending videos. Suddenly the videos are coming what feels like constantly and you have to make sure you don’t leave your phone near your husband where he’ll see a text coming through from a guy he went to seminary with that contains a video. Video friend begins to put the video together.
Step 9: Concoct an elaborate plan to get husband to the party venue without being suspicious.
One good thing about your crazy summer is you have been so busy there is no way your husband will think you have had time to throw him a surprise party with 100+ people, which is how many people have RSVP’d. This is actually true—Anna has now almost completely taken over the party planning. Basically, Anna is throwing your husband a surprise party and you are one of the guests who happens to be married to him.
One thing people have been asking when they have found out your plan is how you are going to get your husband to the venue without him knowing. Initially, you considered just blindfolding him and driving him there, but over the course of the week leading up to the party, a somewhat plausible idea unfolds that is going to require you to lie to your husband approximately 20 times but that might keep him in the dark until he walks in.
The party is going to be held at a large church, in their chapel, which is kind of like a fellowship hall. It’s 20 minutes from your house. You start by making sure that your mother-in-law and sister-in-law can go help Anna set up for the party she is throwing. You then schedule a meeting with a marching band mom friend not far from the church. You want to be able to go there to help set up without your husband wondering why you’re in the area. You also ask your mother-in-law to come get your two younger kids before they go set up, but to tell your husband that she’s taking them out for the rest of the day through dinner.
You have now established yourself and two kids at the venue without him getting suspicious.
Video friend, whose name is Marshall, has now found out he can’t come. You tell him not to tell your husband yet. Guests are arriving for the party at 5, and your husband thinks Marshall is arriving in town around 3. You tell Marshall to keep up that facade until the morning of the party. You tell your husband your plan is to pick up pizza for dinner on your way home from your band meeting.
The morning of the party, at your instruction, Marshall says he’s actually running late and won’t be in town until more like 5:15, so could he take us all out for Christian’s birthday at a restaurant? Your husband asks you about this and you say, sure, you can meet them for dinner nearby after your meeting. Your husband says he’ll ask Marshall what his kids like to eat.
You quickly run and text Marshall and tell him to tell your husband his kids like Mexican.
Within 5 minutes, your husband has suggested you eat at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from the church, which is exactly what you wanted him to do, so that he will be close enough that it’s not weird to ask him to pick you up at the church, which you’ll be asking him to do later.
Now that you have a plan to get your husband and two older sons to the correct area, you have to actually get him to the church.
You ask your band mom friend to pick you up. You tell your husband you are going to pick up spirit wear shirts band parents ordered, and then you and band mom friend are going to go through them and organize them with another friend. You don’t tell him where you’ll be exactly, but you ask if he can just pick you up on the way to dinner.
You are wanting him to pick you up at 5:15, because as the afternoon wears on, Marshall is going to say he’s not going to be at the restaurant until closer to 5:30.
You do have your meeting with your friend, and then she drops you off at the church. When your husband asks where to pick you up, you tell him you all went to a big room at the church because another band mom friend who he knows goes to the church and said you could use it to organize all the band shirts.
When you go inside the chapel, Anna is executing the set-up like a conductor. You change clothes. Guests begin to arrive.
You told your oldest son not to leave the house until 4:55, since you want guests to have time to arrive. At 4:40, he texts you, worried, because for the first time in his life your husband has decided to be somewhere early. You tell him to stall however he can until 4:55.
At about 4:50, your husband texts you that Marshall won’t be at the restaurant until 5:30, and that that’s good, because as he was putting his shoes on, your oldest son decided he had to poop. You die laughing. Your oldest son tells you later he just sat on his phone in the bathroom for ten minutes and he feels terrible about it because he is an empath. You congratulate him on his lie.
Everything is ready. The guests have arrived. Your boys are texting you updates as they get closer. About ten minutes before they get there, you text all three of them and say that when they get there, you’ll need them to come inside the chapel to help carry boxes of shirts out to the car.
At this point, you feel like your husband must know something is up. You tell yourself that even if it’s not a complete surprise, he will still be shocked to see 100 people waiting for him, including several out-of-town friends.
You see the van pull up and park. The lights in the chapel are off, and everyone is quiet.
The boys and your husband get out of the car. Another party guest has just arrived and is panicked to see he has arrived at the same time. He plays it very cool and walks up to the chapel door, with your husband, present in hand, saying he’s there “to see a family member.” Your husband is just happy to see his friend.
One of your boys opens the door and walks in, and your husband’s friend follows him with his present, looking crestfallen that he has ruined the surprise. Then your husband starts to walk in, the lights turn on, and “Rocky Top” plays over the speakers.
Step 10: Have the party!
Your husband is completely surprised. He says that he had absolutely no idea. You saw him look shocked before he walked in the door, when the room was dark, and you ask what he was thinking. You assume he figured it out due to seeing his friend with a present. He said he didn’t think it was weird that his friend was there at the same time, and he looked surprised because thought that there was a meeting going on (in the dark?) and he didn’t want to disturb it.
You are glad your husband thinks meetings with the lights off are normal. You are so glad your husband is so trusting. You apologize for all the lying.
Everyone eats tacos, you lead a trivia quiz on Christian Crouch lore, cupcakes are eaten, and everyone sits and watches the video Marshall made. You cry even though you’ve watched it two times already. Your husband is so loved. You are so proud to be married to him, even if he would make a very bad detective. Every frantic text, every sleepless night, every logistic you had to figure out—they were all worth it.
The party ends, and many guests graciously stay to help clean up.
You vow to never throw another surprise party. When your husband turns 50, you will just ask Anna to throw one. You are tired.
When I turned 30, my husband took me out to a nice dinner and gave me a folder that included more than 30 emails or letters he had collected from people in my life. They wrote about how much they cared about me, they reminded me about ways I had been a blessing to them, and they shared encouragement about growing older. It was a precious gift not just for the sentiments expressed in the letters, but also because I knew my husband had been planning it for months.
I wanted to do something special for Christian turning 40, and I decided on a surprise party, and from them on, it just grew into something bigger than I anticipated. And yet because Christian loves people so much, and he is so faithful and loyal to old and new friends, I knew the best gift I could give him was the presence of at least some of those people, and encouraging messages from the ones who couldn’t come.
By the grace of God, I managed to pull it off—well, Anna and I and many other people pulled it off. I hope you find my guide to doing this helpful.