An Around the Clock Bridal Shower
Ensures Variety and Fun

If you are hosting a bridal shower, you may want to consider an age-old classic – The Around The Clock Bridal Shower theme. Although this theme has been used for showers held for some of our mothers and maybe even grandmothers, it is still around today because it is both useful and fun.

The basic premise of the Around the Clock Bridal Shower theme is simple. Each guest is given a specific hour of the day and purchases a gift corresponding to her assigned time. For example, a guest who gets 8:00am might purchase a toaster or coffee maker from the bride’s registry. Someone assigned 10:00pm could buy a sheet set or duvet cover. You get the point.

So…How do you go about planning and hosting an Around the Clock Bridal Shower?

Planning can be easy by following a few simple steps:

• Start by determining your guest list. Next to each name, place a plus next to the names of people you think are most likely to attend the shower. Put a question mark next to those you’re unsure of, and also designate those who are invited but live out-of-town and may not be able to travel to attend the shower.

• Now make a master list of which guest will be assigned to each hour of the day. You don’t have to make it 24 hours, unless you want to. 6:00 or 7:00am thru 12:00pm will probably be fine. (After all, there’s only so much bedding that a bride can register for.) Tip: Assign the guests most likely to attend to each hour of the day first. Then start doubling up (or tripling, depending on the size of the guest list) on the times with those who may not be able to make it. That way, you’ll have the best chance of the bride-to-be receiving a gift for each hour of the day on the day of the shower.

• Get your invitations ready and make sure you’ve included each guest’s assigned time of the day and an explanation of the shower’s theme. One great way to have guests mark their gifts with their assigned times is to send individualized time stickers in the invitations, which each guest can place on her wrapped gift or envelope.

• Send out invitations and start planning for your Around the Clock Bridal Shower.

Now that invitations are out and each guest knows what hour of the day her gift should match, it’s time to think about all the other details that can be influenced by your Around the Clock Bridal Shower theme. Here are some ideas that can add fun to this theme.

• Make foods that correspond to different times of the day. For example, you could have a quiche and mixed fruit (breakfast foods); small sandwiches, salads, and cold veggies (lunch foods); and favorite dinner foods in appetizer portions – like grilled chicken or steak kabobs, chicken wings, or mini pot pies in a fluffy pastry.

• Display the food you prepare on round platters and arrange it so that it resembles a clock.

• Decorate tables with centerpieces that match the around the clock bridal shower theme. You could make flower pots with small decorative sundials which can later be given away to guests as door prizes or prizes for winning a game.

• And speaking of games...consider using a fun Around the Clock Bridal Shower game. When the bride-to-be is opening presents, it is a good idea to include guests in this activity by giving them something to do. Often times, bridal shower bingo is used at this time. An alternative to bridal shower bingo that fits the around the clock theme is to play this game:

  Give guests a piece of paper with a blank clock face on it – Two sided if you assigned more than 12 hours to guests in the invitations. Have each guest write their best guess of what gift will be given to the bride for each designated time. (She’ll get at least one correct! – The gift she brought.) Then, as the bride opens her gifts, guests keep track of how many they guessed correctly. You may want to adopt a rule of counting it as correct if it is within one hour of being correct (Example: Bath towels were given as a gift for 7:00am and a guest wrote it on her clock for 8:00am.) At the end, give a prize to the guest who got the most correct.

There are so many ways to incorporate your around the clock bridal shower theme into the party. Come back soon as we develop this page to include a downloadable, printable bridal shower game template for our bridal shower game described above. We'll also be adding around the clock stickers to include in your invitations in our store in the upcoming weeks. Or you can just subscribe to our RSS feed (click under the navbar for easy instructions) for automatic updates as soon as we add new pages, products, or changes. If you haven’t used this before, you’ll love it. It’s just the information that you want without the hassles of email or spam.