“It can be challenging to be creative sometimes, when you’re so inundated with craziness,” says celebrity party planner Sasha Souza of Sasha Souza Events in Sonoma, Calif. “That can quash your creative juices. But there are options to make it special and celebrate what they’ve accomplished.” Here are some quarantine graduation ideas for celebrating (safely) even during COVID-19 lockdown, beyond just sending high school graduation gifts or college graduation gifts.
7 quarantine graduation ideas
Not to be outdone, Facebook’s having its own virtual graduation—#Graduation2020—on May 15, with Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Garner, Awkwafina, Lil Nas X, Simone Biles, and Miley Cyrus scheduled to speak or perform. IRL, many school districts are looking for ways to safely celebrate distantly, whether it’s drive-in graduation ceremonies where the grads and their families maintain social distancing by staying in their cars and watching the ceremony on a big screen or virtual celebrations via Zoom or other online options. “People want to be able to see each other, so like the drive-by birthdays, some parents are getting together and arranging drive-bys for the graduates,” Souza says. Parents at one school in Salem, Ore. have pooled resources to create a permanent mural dedicated to the class of 2020, where each student can decorate a tile as they would have decorated their own cap for the ceremony. In Alameda, Calif., they created a celebratory citywide Senior Signing Day on May 1, where kids headed outside at 10:45 a.m. to put out their graduation signs and community members stepped outside at the same time to cheer them on. Consider what you’d want to have at the celebration, and how you might be able to reproduce that idea. Think about graduation songs you can play in the background or ways to decorate the space behind your grad. “At most social events, you have a celebratory menu and drink—usually something the kid loves, some sort of dessert, some sort of a recognition of what the event is, and a toast,” Souza says. “Look for ways you can recreate that.” You could send out cupcakes or cookies—places like Wicked Good Cupcakes, Magnolia Bakery, and Kara’s Cupcakes all ship nationwide. Or send out a food suggestion: “We’re having the guest of honor’s favorite tacos, and hope you’ll raise a taco with us.” “Making it special is so important,” Souza says. “You’re all sharing a meal together as a family over FaceTime, so you still get that shared experience of celebrating together.”
