Young people are fighting loneliness and introducing wholesome activities to Texas in an XXL way. Over the past year, a group of twenty-somethings have brought hundreds of strangers together via super-sized picnics. It’s a familiar scene: friends sharing food on a red gingham blanket. But this blanket is bigger than a tennis court.
Big Blanket Super Picnic is bringing people together with their giant open-invite picnics, creating a communal space in Houston where it’s easy to meet new people and providing an answer to the age-old problem of how to make friends as an adult. Their motto: “Be There or Be Lonely.”
Big Blanket founder Caleb Matheson, 26, felt empty after graduating from architecture school in 2022. He watched the close-knit community he once knew disappear and experienced a similar sense of isolation as during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
He isn’t alone. One post-pandemic analysis revealed that there’s a loneliness epidemic among U.S. adults. Approximately 79% of adults aged 18 to 24 report feeling lonely, citing lack of connectivity as a key factor, the analysis found. Gen Z and millennials especially are seeking more in-person connections, as demonstrated by the rise of community-based events that combat loneliness, and the push to meet potential dates at in-person events like running clubs. That’s how Big Blanket was born.
“Young people want to be outside and be social again,” says one Big Blanket organizer and photographer, Aidan Massingale. “We haven't had that for a while. There's rich versions of this desire for true connection and true socialization. We're on the forefront of that and it's really exciting.”
Big Blanket’s picnics offer a space for that connection, particularly in an age when people continue to crave physical connections, but find that making friends in person doesn’t come naturally when everyone is glued to their devices.
“The original idea was, ‘How do you make friends and meet people?’” Massingale says. “Especially in Houston where there’s a lot of cool, creative people but it’s not a very connected city like NYC or LA. Sometimes it’s really not that easy to go up and talk to people, friendly or romantic. There’s not a lot of community spaces like this that are genuinely organic and fun.”
In just the past few months, the 26-year-old has made 30 new friends and witnessed countless others do the same.
“We're so connected these days but we're so disconnected,” Massingale continues. “Not to glorify the old days, but the way our parents socialized was by going out and doing stuff. So, if we're able to create environments where you can connect with people face-to-face and meet people that you wouldn't have met otherwise, that's awesome. Social media is great for what it is, but when you're just at home, you're working from home, you're not in school anymore, you don't have many co-workers to hang out with, it's hard to find friends and just be social.”
Each picnic tests ways to reduce social barriers and help people figure out how to make friends as an adult. The fifth picnic introduced live DJs while number six had arts and crafts, including puzzles, painting and friendship bracelets.
“Every picnic is an experiment in some way,” Matheson says. “Every time we do this stuff we learn something about what makes it easier for people to meet each other in person and build community.”
Forced proximity encourages new and old connections. Big Blanket organizers and couple Olivia Haroutounian, 25, and Rami Namani, 26, say they’ve rekindled bonds with people they lost touch with.
Packed like sardines, picnic attendees rediscover childlike friendships. In one corner, they fly kites, throw frisbees and blow bubbles. In another, they’re barefoot on the blanket that’s somehow always too small, painting rocks and playing card games.
“The big experiment here is hopefully there'll be more of that cross pollination,” Matheson says. “It already happens. Once there's enough people on the blanket, you're just in other people's space. So it happens naturally. But the goal with the [experiments] is that it’s accelerated.”
Building Big Blanket
Big Blanket held its first picnic on April 22, 2023, Earth Day, but the seed was planted the year prior when Matheson attended a communal picnic hosted by his late friend, Imhotep Blot. Although there were only about a dozen people there, Matheson felt the deep social connection he had been longing for. He realized that experience could be shared with more people, if only they had a bigger blanket. So, he made it bigger — much bigger.
With an Amazon account and a dream, Matheson ordered 28 king-size plaid blankets and recruited his friends to help him create the largest picnic and blanket — which has taken around 20 hours of work to make, according to Big Blanket organizer Miranda Gonzalez, 25 — Houston had ever seen.
Since its debut last April, there have been six super picnics at various public parks, with more to come. The weekend picnics are open to everyone, always free, and typically last five hours.
“You see all kinds of people,” says Veeda Shaygan, 23, who DJ’d at Big Blanket number five and has made more than 100 professional and personal connections from the picnics. “It's not just one kind of demographic, it's like all age ranges, all ethnicities, all kinds of backgrounds, just from all over.”
The first picnic took place at Menil Park, drawing strangers from across the area. The second event, Disco Super Picnic, in October was even better. Everyone got groovy at White Oak Bayou Trail as a disco ball spun and funky tunes played. The following month’s Friendsgiving Super Picnic returned to Menil Park.
At that point, the events had been sort of under the official radar, but Matheson wouldn’t get away with showing up at parks without permission much longer. Thanks to word-of-mouth promotion, retro social media marketing and the not-so-subtle picnic blanket that requires 800 quarters and taking over an entire laundromat to wash (shoutout Soap Suds Coin Laundry), news of the super picnics spread. After the fourth event at Elizabeth Baldwin Park in March, the city was on alert.
Early picnics didn’t surpass 150 attendees, but park officials knew that would change, and they were right. The fifth picnic at Memorial Park this April reached an estimated 500 people (who sang “Happy Birthday” to a surprised Matheson). But that was nothing compared to the following month’s picnic back at Elizabeth Baldwin Park, which hit nearly 700 attendees.
The Mayor’s Office of Special Events informed the Big Blanket crew before picnic five that official steps to host such large events had to be taken in advance, like getting a Special Event Park Permit, Sound and Noise-related Equipment Permit, insurance, security, and more.
The event, which has been financed in part by Venmo donations but largely out of the organizers’ pockets, is now getting more complicated — and expensive — to host. Permit fees and supply costs add up.
“It takes a month just organizing everything before the actual picnic. So pretty much after we throw one we’ll start organizing the next one,” says Big Blanket organizer Rohan Agnihotri, 25. “After everything, permits cost probably close to $2,500.”
Because the picnics are becoming unsustainable, Matheson is researching ways to break even, such as applying for grants, working with local food vendors, and partnering with local artists to make merchandise.
After their May 25 event — Big Blanket’s sixth picnic — the group is taking a summer heat hiatus, but will return in the fall. Meanwhile, they’re conceptualizing what’s next and will continue to "grow the blanket to end loneliness." They’ve teased several ideas, such as creating indoor blanket forts, hosting fashion shows or music festivals, and even expanding to other cities.
To know when the next event is, follow Big Blanket Super Picnic on Instagram. Come lonely and leave happy.
