It’s Graduation Season–Our Very Best Ideas

The Best Ideas for Graduation-Senior Table Displays, Grad Decor, and Party Ideas

This post contains all our best graduation party ideas. We’ve thrown multiple parties, each unique in it’s own way. We have a ton of ideas for graduation party decor, easy menu ideas and senior display photo tables and other creative ways to celebrate the graduates! It is so fun to see all the posts about the rights of passage such as graduation and prom, etc. It’s especially nice to see these things get celebrated.

Here are some of my favorite ideas from ways we have celebrated our own children when they graduated in case you a planning a celebration, as well as the best gift ideas to help if you are shopping for a graduate. I love this creative senior photo display in this large gold frame.

A special idea is to order custom cups in honor of the graduate. You can find options for these here, or we have used cups with the class date on them like these here.

Some of you may remember some of these parties if you read our blog regularly, and some of you may have even been reading long enough to see our kids grow up! Last year Christy’s daughter graduated and even though they were overseas, they were able to come back to the states to have her celebration. Christy used the college colors and set up a casual but festive event, you can read the post here. Since we seem to be of one mind with our entertaining style, we both used tiered trays to display themed sugar cookies, you can find one of these here.

The year before, when we were still in the thick of the pandemic, we hosted an outdoor celebration for our son. All of his end of year events, like prom and his graduation ceremony, were cancelled so it was important to find a way to celebrate him. I used his high school colors (the lovely combination of green and orange!) to theme his party, which we held on our deck and in our backyard. You can read more here.

It was definitely a HOT day (we didn’t have the party until late July), so we made sure to have plenty of cold drinks including a water with lemon, lime and mint which was very popular! We also used an affordable tent and rented tables and chairs so people could eat in the shade. A tent like this is a great investment if you entertain outdoors regularly.

We special ordered foam cups with his graduation year. I like to order party goods from this online store, though I don’t think they are doing the year cups at this point unfortunately? I displayed flavored chips on a chip rack, this is a trick I use often at parties, it’s a great way to upgrade individual bags of chips and save tablespace at the same time.

A few years back, when Christy’s oldest graduated she designed the cutest favors, you can see how she did it here.

Another creative way to honor a graduate is to print out a sheet all about them, you can easily design something like this these days in CANVA.

When my other son graduated, I created a poster with some snapshots of him throughout the years, added some framed pictures of him on the table and set out a basket for cards. I also served store-bought cupcakes embellished with these year toppers.

Here are some of our favorite graduation gift ideas we’ve shared over the years, while money is always appreciated, sometimes a tangible gift is preferred.