How to Celebrate Your Graduation

Graduation is perhaps the most exciting time in a young person's life. After dragging yourself out of bed year after year to go to school, you are finally free from the confines of the hallowed halls of high school. Here are some ideas to help you celebrate that freedom.

Cook Out

Have a celebratory cook out for just your friends. Most grads have a cook out for their actual graduation with family, but this one is just for those friends you may not get to see much of after the summer is over. Get them together and throw some food on the fire. Nothing bonds people like the smell of sizzling meat and the heat of an open flame. It's one of the great mysteries of life.

Dinner Out

Get a group of your closest high school friends together and go out to dinner. Soon you will all be going your separate ways and even though you vow to get together often, life often gets in the way and it doesn't seem to happen as often as you hope it will. Rent a limousine, get dressed up and choose a swanky restaurant or a restaurant with a laid back atmosphere where you can throw back your head and laugh at all the good times you've had through the years.

Sleep Over

I don't mean a high school sleep over. You're adults now! Get some of your closest friends together and rent a hotel room or two. You can stay up late, talk, gossip and start pledging those vows that you'll never lose touch. You may still lose touch, but it will feel good to say you won't. And there's always Facebook.

Plan a Trip

Plan a cruise, or a less expensive road trip. Plan your destination and create some once-in-a-lifetime memories to take to college. Take plenty of pictures to remember the trip. Life goes by fast, and every once in awhile it feels good to reflect on the good old days.

Say Thank You

Here's a very inexpensive way to celebrate your graduation...thank a teacher. Every one has that one teacher that they will never forget. It could be the one who made sure you passed seventh grade math or your first grade teacher who taught you to love to read. Take a moment to write an old fashioned kind of letter to the special teacher in your life. Let them know you made it, and you have them to thank. I can guarantee they will appreciate the gesture.