A Drive-By Bridal Shower | An Alternative to a Tradition

What do you do when a pandemic de-rails your original plans for a traditional bridal shower? You improvise, of course!

Once upon a time, we had envisioned a coffee (and tea) themed “traditional” bridal shower for my sister Amy. We secured a location, compiled a guest list, planned out a brunch menu, Pinterest’ed decoration ideas – the whole nine yards.

And then, March arrived. And with the month of March came a pandemic that shut down our entire country. Everyone was sent into quarantine & all of our plans got completely derailed. Scratch that: “derailed” doesn’t quite seem like a strong enough word – how about “obliterated”.

We postponed the date of the shower in the hopes that we might still be able to host our party as-planned. However, as the end of April arrived & we stepped into the month of May, we realized that any hope we had for a “traditional” bridal shower was simply not possible. So, we began to search for an alternative.

An Alternative to a Traditional Bridal Shower

We settled on the idea of having a “drive-by” bridal shower. We contacted all of our guests (whom we had just mailed invitations to a few weeks before – in the invitation we had included a note saying, “We really hope we can see you, but just a heads up that all of our plans might change.”) and let them know that we were completely changing the format of our bridal shower.

We invited guests to “drive-by” our new party location: my parent’s house. They have a circular driveway in front of their house, so it was super easy to invite people “in” the top driveway and “out” the bottom. We set up a station toward the end, with our favors, some prize baskets, and as a place for us to welcome the cars in. We invited our guests to drive-by during a specific window of time, to see the bride-to-be and give her her gift – all from the safety & security of their own car.

Additionally, we invited our guests to mail (or drop off) their gifts if they were unable (or did not feel comfortable) driving by on the day of the shower.

Building Momentum

In order to keep all of our guests informed, we created a Facebook group & invited all of our guests into it. We still wanted to have fun & celebrate the bride-to-be, so I set up daily posts with “activities”.

• I asked our guests to share a piece of advice for the bride (just like happens at a traditional bridal shower).
• I asked our guests to share a memory, funny story, or photo of the bride.
• We played two virtual games:
• We asked a set of questions – all of which the answers were either “the bride” or “the groom” (questions like: “who said ‘I love you’ first?” and “who is a better dancer?”).
• We also posted a series of questions specifically about Amy.
• And in order to present the answers to our two games, we created two videos of us asking Amy the questions (just like we would have done in a traditional bridal shower).
• As a special bonus, we also had Nathan’s roommate ask him the second set of questions (the ones specifically about Amy), to see how many he would get “right”. Amazingly, he got most of the answers spot on!

Of course, all the time I kept reminding our guests of the “drive-by” shower & how we were so excited to see them!

The Drive-By Bridal Shower

The day of the shower arrived – and in typical south-western Pennsylvania fashion, the weather was utterly bonkers. First, it was cold & cloudy, and then, it began to snow – at one point it was like a blizzard! Then, the snow faded away, blue skies rolled in, the sun came out, and it looked like a normal spring day – it was so bizarre!

We had a blast welcoming our guests to the “shower” – the cars were spaced out just perfectly to give Amy enough time to chat for a few moments with each guest – it was perfect.

From there, we all went up into my parent’s house for some lunch & to watch Amy open her gifts.

To Zoom or Not to Zoom

I will mention – we didn’t make Amy open her gifts all alone in front of a computer screen. In fact, we talked about live-streaming her opening her gifts via Facebook Live or Zoom, and ultimately, we decided against it. Amy wasn’t comfortable with the idea of people watching her on a computer screen, so we came up with the idea of simply taking video of the whole day & sharing a highlight video with everyone after-the-fact. (Scroll all the way to the bottom to view that video!)

In physical attendance to the shower were just handful of people: Amy’s immediate family (the Mom’s & Grandma’s) and her bridesmaids. That was it! We all fit comfortably in my parent’s living room & it created the most cozy atmosphere for us to celebrate our sweet bride.

And, as you can see in these photos – there was definitely no shortage of gifts! So many people ordered their gifts online & simply had them shipped to my parent’s house – the groom’s Mom brought a whole car-full of gifts from her side of the family, and a few people did drop off gifts the week before the shower.

Here is the highlight video that Derrick created for the day!

Were we disappointed to have to change our bridal shower plans so drastically? Yes. It was really challenging at first to wrap our brains around this new plan!

In the end though, the “final result” was just perfect. Sure, it was untraditional & completely different from anything we’ve ever been a part of before – but these are crazy days! Ultimately, we felt like we did the very best we could – making lemonade out of the lemons we were given.

And you know what? It was wonderful.
We still celebrated our beautiful bride.
She was still able to see & visit with some of her favorite people.
She was still showered with a mountain of gifts.
We still ate delicious food.
And most importantly: we did the very best we could to make our bride-to-be feel loved, cherished, and celebrated.
Being a bride is a once-in-a-lifetime moment & we wanted to do the best we could to honor this moment in Amy’s life. And I think we did a pretty good job.