Planning a Family Reunion? Get All of the Clan Involved--Including the Men

When my immediate family holds a reunion, it isn’t a big affair--eight people in all. But we live on different sides of the country, are busy people and all have our own ideas about where to meet. So organizing one of these events is no picnic, as I found out in July when I got part of my family together for a week in Maui. I did the scheduling and research, booked the airline tickets and reserved the condo units, but the rest was up to them, or so I maintained.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way because there were groceries to buy, excursions to plan, clothes to wash and expenses to tabulate--a good deal of which fell to me. We had a great time, but I was glad to go off duty once I got home. So I can hardly imagine what it must be like to plan a reunion for a big family.

According to a 1996 study conducted by Reunions magazine and the Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management Department at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, 200,000 American families hold reunions every year; the average attendance is 40. Such smallish reunions, often held to celebrate major milestones (like Grandma’s and Grandpa’s 50th wedding anniversary), let far-flung brothers and sisters reconnect while their children get to know one another. “I used to see my cousins on a regular basis,” says Jennifer Crichton, author of “Family Reunion: Everything You Need to Know to Plan Unforgettable Get-Togethers” (Workman Publishing, $13.95). “But these days, cousins don’t often run in packs. Family reunions give kids that experience.”

The study also found that most reunions are organized by women, partly because reunion planning, like making Thanksgiving dinner and wrapping Christmas presents, has long been considered women’s work. A rising interest in genealogy has led some men to instigate family reunions, but it’s generally women who see to the details.

Edith Wagner, the editor of Reunions magazine, tells a story about a family patriarch who noticed that his wife and daughters were doing all the work during a big get-together. So he vowed to hold the next reunion someplace where the women in the family wouldn’t have to cook or make beds.

There are lots of options for relatively labor-free family reunions: resorts, fully staffed vacation villas, dude ranches and cruise ships.

Wagner says it’s the rare group that has enough money for a cruise, though cruising remains almost everybody’s reunion dream. Family camps like Estes Park Center and Snow Mountain Ranch, both in Colorado and both run by the YMCA of the Rockies, are more affordable reunion destinations, with accommodations in cabins or lodges, meal plans, outdoorsy activities, day camp for the kids and a staff well versed in making family get-togethers fun. For all these reasons, Estes Park Center and Snow Mountain Ranch are two of the most popular spots in the country for family reunions. About 650 such gatherings are held every year at these two facilities, which have space enough in lodges and big cabins to accommodate more than one reunion at once. To reserve space, you’ve sometimes got to call as much as two years in advance. The Estes Park camp is a favorite for summertime gatherings, while families who love to ski gravitate to Snow Mountain Ranch near Winter Park.

Finding a place to hold a reunion isn’t really the hard part, though, according to editor Wagner, author Crichton and Tom Ninkovich, founder of Reunion Research, which publishes books on reunion planning and has an informative Internet site. Here are a few tips from the experts:

* Choose a place with a wide range of activities, particularly for the kids. “Happy kids, happy parents, happy grandparents. End of story,” Wagner says.

* “The goal is to have a wonderful time together, not to go to an amazing place,” Crichton says. Thus a family camp or a state park may be a better site than Tuscany or the south of France.

* Set a budget. Let everyone know what their share of the costs will be well in advance, so they’ll have plenty of time to save for the trip. Remember that different family members have different financial capabilities. Still, “everyone has the right to attend their own reunion,” as Ninkovich says.

* Start planning early: a year in advance for gatherings of up to 100, two years for groups of 100 or more.

* “Pick a date and stick to it,” says Wagner, because once you make a schedule change to accommodate one person, you quickly find that someone else can’t come and the whole event starts falling apart like a house of cards.

* Grown siblings should try to treat one another like friends to avoid regressing into old roles during family reunions, Crichton advises, an idea she got from Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners.

* And don’t plan a reunion all by yourself. Delegate responsibility, taking each family member’s unique talents into account. For instance, computer-savvy teens excel at doing announcements and memory books. When everybody gets involved in the work, everybody feels part of the event.

The YMCA of the Rockies has a useful Internet site, https://www .ymcarockies.org, or write to YMCA of the Rockies, Group Sales Department, Estes Park, CO 80511-2550, telephone (970) 586-4444.

Other good resources for family reunion planners are “The Family Reunion Sourcebook” by Edith Wagner (Lowell House, $16.95); “Family Reunion Handbook” by Tom Ninkovich (Reunion Research, $14.95); the Reunions magazine Internet site, https://www.reunionsmag.com, and the magazine’s Reunions Workbook (available for $10; P.O. Box 11727, Milwaukee, WI 53211, tel. [800] 373-7933); and Reunion Research, P.O. Box 12, Auberry, CA 93602, tel. (559) 855- 2101, Internet https://www.reuniontips.com.