Last summer, my niece got married. So naturally, my sister and I hosted a ronak for her. A ronak is a Pakistani cultural event before the wedding, where the bride’s close girl friends and family get together, dress, up, play the dholki, sing songs, eat and in our case also play a couple of games.
The Setup
Because it was summer, we were able to do this outside in my sister’s backyard which made the perfect backdrop for a garden theme ronak. Though I would have loved to incorporate real flowers everywhere, that is not very budget friendly. So, I went on a search for flower vines on amazon. I found some that I liked and ordered them hoping they’d be enough.
I have also collected some party decor items over the years from hosting and helping friends with their parties which I like to reuse and incorporate in different ways.
I used tape to hang the vines equally around the white fence. Then I incorporated thin gold and green tinsels between them. On a part of the fence, I also added string lights for the night time.
The bench, where the bride sat, was simply outlined with one of the vines and then I added pillows and the look was complete!
Activities
DIY Flower Crown
Here is where the flowers were real. I set up a table on the deck with everything needed to make flower crowns: jars of flowers, floral wire, floral tape and scissors. I taught my other three nieces how to make them, so that they could help the guests make their own. Another idea is that you can also place a tablet that people can scroll through with instructions. Here is my tutorial.
Bingo
I created bingo cards that had Pakistani wedding words on them. There needs to be one caller that has all the words and knows the definitions of these words in English. The caller describes the word, one at a time in English and the players have to match with the word on their bingo card.
We’ve played this a few times now and everyone really gets into it and enjoys it, even the older aunties.
Would She Rather
I created another card in which the guests got to see who knew the bride the best. Once everyone filled it out, we checked the answers together. Pro tip: have the bride fill one out too so that no one tries to convince her that their answer is the correct one when you are going over the answers. lol 🙂
Advice Card
This is a great gift for the bride to take home with her. I designed an advice card with a few prompts to help guests get started on advice they could give her. For this, I usually buy a small box from the Dollar Store (they have many nice ones in the gifting section) that it would fit in to and have everyone put the cards in there for the bride to take with her. Here is a freebie words of wisdom card. I will plan to include the whole bundle in my shop soon with Bingo cards and “Would She Rather” cards as well.
Dholki
My sister is a dholki expert so we all sat around signing songs. We printed out a songs book as well to make it easier for everyone to sing along. We even included some English songs that would go well with the dholki beat. Some popular English songs were, You Don’t Know Your Beautiful (1D), Love Story (Taylor Swift) and A Whole New World (Aladdin). Here is a quick reel of her dholki.
The Food
We figured that with all of the traditional events coming up for the wedding, most of the food served would be Pakistani food so we decided to do something different. We chose to do a taco bar where everyone could mix and match their favorite things. Here are the items that we included:
- Ground beef with taco seasoning (homemade)
- Chicken taco kit (from Costco)
- Guacamole (homemade): fresh garlic, cilantro, red onioi, jalapeno, lemon, salt and pepper
- Cilantro-lime rice (homemade)
- Bean salad (homemade)
- Salsas + pico from the fresh section of our local grocery store
- White queso (Tostitos brand)
- Shredded Mexican style cheese
- Nachos (On the Border Cantina style, my all-time favorite!!)
For drinks we kept it simple with mango pineapple juice and water. For dessert, there was a tiramisu parfait, brownie truffles and kulfi.
