planning an awesome eurovision party

IT’S NEARLY EUROVISION! I am so excited! In our house Eurovision is one of the three main events of the year (the other two being Halloween and Christmas, of course). I firmly believe it should be a bank holiday. Sod the saints days, Eurovision is far more important. And that’s coming from someone whose birthday falls on St George’s Day. It’s the perfect combination of cheese, glitter, silly costumes, pyrotechnics, and bad jokes. If Eurovision were a cake, it would be the best but weirdest cake ever.

You’ve probably guessed by now that we throw a party to celebrate the song contest every year. We’ve been doing it for at least the past five years, so we’ve learnt quite a lot along the way about how to make Eurovision completely awesome. Of course, it would still be amazing if you sat on your own drinking tea with your cats. A very fine way to spend an evening. However we like any excuse for a party and honour it in the Best and Most Correct Way.

Because I’m a lovely person, I’m going to share with you the secrets to hosting simply the best Eurovision party.

How to plan an awesome Eurovision party

Decide your theme

There are two main ways we’ve tried this. You can either ask your guests to choose a country to represent (or draw it out of a hat for them if you’re feeling like a bit of a meanie), or you can base the party around the host country. The first year we had a party we didn’t even have a theme, but we’ve upped our game a lot since then. Which you choose is influenced largely by who the host is. A couple of years ago Sweden hosted and at the time most of us were working for a well known Swedish furniture retailer. It was super easy to embrace the culture and get loads of tasty food, so we had a great time being Swedish for the night. However it’s a bit more difficult if the host is a more obscure European country. What if Moldova hosted?! I don’t know what goes on in Moldova!

This year we’ve asked people to choose a country to represent. Hopefully everyone will turn up dressed as their country in some way – either in the colours of the flag or in an outfit inspired in some way by the national dress (or, admittedly, stereotypes). Each guest also brings a snack of some kind of treat to contribute to the buffet. This not only takes the pressure off you a bit (hosting a party is haaaard), but also results in a tasty and eclectic spread. We used to say drinks too, but then the snapps incident of 2014 happened (it was less an “incident” and more just the fact that lemon snapps tastes like lemon pledge).

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Add food and drink

This is largely influenced by the previous point, but food is life and drink is fun so I wasn’t going to not include it. As young’uns we’ve always had an understanding that you bring some kind of snack to any party/gathering/sleepover. I can’t afford to decently cater for a group of people by myself. Not unless everyone wants to be slurping through a big bowl of noodles together. And I definitely can’t afford that much booze. This is where the theme fits in really nicely. Of course, if you happen to be rich enough to provide everything then go ahead, but I bet our buffet will be better 😛

For the past few years I have baked some kind of centre piece to represent the host country. They’re throwing the main party, gotta honour them in some way! This year I’m making Portugese egg custard tarts, or Pastel de nata. Last year I made Kiev Cake for Ukraine, 2016 was Princess Cake for Sweden, year before was Sacher Torte for Austria. My memory doesn’t go back much further than that. I love baking, so it’s nice to have an opportunity to try something a bit different. Adds a little something extra to the buffet too.

This year we’re also going to make a cocktail for everyone. Really it’s because we have a big ol’ drinks dispenser that we’ve not had for very long and this is a nice reason to use it. Served us very well at my birthday party! We were going to make a yellow and blue cocktail like the flag of Ukraine, but apparently it’s super hard to get the colours to stay separate in a big container. We’ll think of something yummy.

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There are also a bunch of drinking games out there if you really want to commit. Most of them centre around stuff happening, for instance drinking every time there’s fire on the stage. It’s a good idea to do it in two stages if you do it this way – one set of rules for the performances and one set for the results. Definitely include drinking every time the UK gets nil points! You might all end up a bit messy though!

Throw in some decorations

Well obviously, it’s a party. Our living room at the moment has flags EVERYWHERE. We’ve got a big Ukraine flag on the wall, and bunting of all the flags of Europe. Australia isn’t there though because it is not in Europe. Also it was not in Eurovision when I made the bunting. If you’re not quite crazy enough to spend hours of your life colouring in all the flags of Europe, it’s super easy to just go with the colours of the host country. It would be even easier if you did that last year because you could reuse it all this year.

You can get paper napkins cheaply from the supermarket to lay out on the buffet table. We have blue and yellow ones for Ukraine (they were for Sweden last year) which will be laid out across our dining table. Not that you’ll be able to see the table for all the food that will be on it. I’ve also made little flags on sticks so it’s easy to tell which country each food is from.

There’s a lot you can do to make your house look suitably Eurovision-esque, just let your cheesiness spirit run wild (we all have one, don’t lie and say you don’t). Remember that for Eurovision there is no such thing as too much!