If we would have stayed in Connecticut, we would have had to wait for blood test results. That’s why we eloped to Rhode Island (where there is no waiting period nor a blood test requirement). Ditto on the big ceremonies. I wasn’t trying to get into a pissing contest with you, I just found it amusing that we both were wed in courthouses.
gulp - about $30,000 for 300 guest…
one hell of a party.
one big pain in the ass. Neither on of us felt like it was really our wedding…between 2 moms and a stepmom, and the wedding planner…we had no say whatsoever. Her folks are socialites, I had people flying in from South America…all the parents felt like it had to be a big party. never really asked us what we wanted. At first we were all for it, but as things progressed and the bickering and whatever silliness that occurred, again nobody asked what we wanted to do, we both felt the desire to elope. In the end we just sat back and enjoyed the ride.
Again, it was quite the party.
Well, me and my former husband went to the justice of the peace, so that was free.
I got my wedding dressf rom his best friend(a man) for $7.
There was a Christmas party that night, so that was our reception.
Yep, I spent more moeny than I got out of the wedding thats for sure.
I’m not sure how much it ended up costing, but I think we all got our money’s worth. Flew down to the Caymans for about 5 days (this April) with just the family (about 20 people). We got married waist deep in the water (wetsuit, no dress!!), my SO’s step brother took photos, my cousin officiated. Two dinners out with the group, and lots of diving and hanging out. A vacation with a wedding thrown in.
It might have cost as much as a “typical” white wedding, but I think it was well spent. We also had a party for our friends here in Colorado in June, and that cost about $3000 - renting a cabin for the night, catered dinner, and a keg. A terrific time was had by all, even if it was mildly stressful (we’re not very social people).
I never added it up. My dress was a gift from my best friends mother, who is a seamstress. Family and friends cooked a whole mess of food. Hubby and I bought invitations and rented chairs. And a car. Got liquor at a wholesaler. Pulled it off in about a month.
It was one of those backyard receptions that Alessan is so disdainful of. What a party!
Not disdainful - intrigued. I’ve never been to a wedding with less than 200 people in my life. Perhaps if I had grown up in the States, I would have had a small wedding, but I didn’t, so I didn’t. Unless they feel a need to rebel, most people generally do things the way their society dictates. There’s nothing really wrong with that, in moderation.
Hey! 100 posts!
Married in 1976, in my parents’ backyard, which was all we asked of them in the way of support (I was 27, my finacee 30). Her dad was the minister, many photographer friends volunteered to take photos. About 120 guests, cost around $3000.
Would I do it like that again? Well, yes, in 1986, got married in my second wife’s parents’ backyard. 100 guests. Cost, around $4000. Close enough. Last time, though.
Now, both my step-daughters did the heavy-duty route, but since they were pulling down the big bucks by then, they carried 80% of the load in each case.
My wedding cost about 2K including:
[ul]
[li]a dress that brought tears to hubby’s eyes-in a good way[/li][li]rings (celtic knotwork design handmade in Ireland)[/li][li]dinner at a four star restaurant[/li][li]flowers & cake[/li][/ul]
We only had 10 people though. My only regret is that more family couldn’t come. My family is in the UK & DH’s is in SoCal. DH is AD Navy so we couldn’t plan very far ahead. Other than that it was wonderful. My mom said she had never seen me smile so much in one day.
Alessan I’m curious, where are you from?
Awwww… I can always call you Mr. Bagman. BWAAAhahahaha.
Um… Mr. Hobo?
The American Heritage Dictionary says a bagman is a “person who collects money for racketeers.”
Congrats to you both, Baglady and obfusciatrist!
Mrs. Firefly and I went the wedding-and-catered-reception route, but we did it as inexpensively as possible; I was in grad school, and her folks didn’t have a lot of money. We had dance tapes on a sound system in lieu of a band, but we managed the wedding (university chapel), flowers, cake, photographer, a heavy hors d’ouvres buffet for 75 guests, champagne all around, limo for the bridal party, all for about $3500. This was in 1991 (great year for getting married - ask pldennison and Peta, or Opal and UDD!), so it would probably cost a little bit more now, maybe 4-4.5K.
I’m glad we did both wedding and reception indoors; before the wedding, it was 90+ degrees and muggy (SC in mid-May can be like that), and we had one hell of a thunderstorm outside during the ceremony.
We had a great time, and if we were to go back in time, I’d do it that way again. Mrs. F would opt for eloping, though!
I do have one serious recommendation to anyone getting married: if you’re having a reception and hiring a photographer, have him/her take the formal pictures of the wedding party, etc. before the ceremony.
The formal pix with the wedding party, family members, etc. in the church are usually done after the ceremony, and they can easily take an hour or more. We’ve known lots of couples who felt they missed most of their own wedding receptions due to the picture-taking session afterward. Mrs. F and I went to school on their experience, and did the pictures beforehand. We were at our own reception from the get-go, and that made it a lot more fun for everyone, I believe - especially us.
I think this is exactly what we avoided, and it sounds like other people posting here did too. I really wanted our wedding to be just that - ours - not an occasion for anybody’s parents to cosy up to business partners and impress the neighbours.
But OTOH, different things are right for different people - we all have to decide what’s important, I suppose.
Yeah, Alessan, where are you from?
Charley.
Well, Charley, I’m Israeli. I think the custom of having big weddings is both a Jewish family\community thing (which may have died out in the States) and a Mediterranian thing (classic Italian weddings are similar, as are Greek and Arab). One reason the parties are so big is that they are considered a legitimate way to raise money for “the young couple”. That’s why most Israelis bring checks and not gifts, and the party itself is usually considered the parents’ present. As for the fact that many or most of the people there came because our folks - well, as long as everybody’s having fun, they should live abnd be well. The more the merrier.
I’ve known a few couples who would have preffered a small, American-style wedding. Fortunately, my wife and I get along quite well with our parents, and they seem to like each other. They let us do generally what we wanted - not a bad deal, considering where the money came from. It took an intense six months of planning, but we had one hell of a party. Give me 25 years or so, and I’ll do it again.
Got married 4 years ago; budgeted NZD$3000… went over by $500, but that was everything, including dinner for 80 odd, although the photographs were a present from friends, as were the wedding invitations.
We had a medieval wedding – with great help from our local SCA group – and held it in conjunction with the annual mid-winter feast. It was great; held in a church hall/basement/crypt with great atmosphere, entirely lit by candles and with everyone in costume (except one small table of elderly fuddy-duddy in-laws who felt that costumes were silly, but who by the end of it felt the most out of place and that perhaps a costume would have been a good idea). 
We planned and paid for the whole thing ourselves. The church hall (being under the church) satisfied my religious in-laws and not being actually in a church satified my agnostic self. My lady’s father took the service (he being a Methodist minister), and we wrote it ourself to have both religious and secular readings (and no prayers), all carefully designed to keep religious and non-religious family happy (and us too).
My lady made her wedding dress (early 16th C german, derived from a Cranach painting), most of my matching outfit, along with a good chunk of both the bridesmaids dresses.
Moment of most stress: Getting up the morning of the wedding to find her wedding dress still in pieces all over the floor – she and the bridesmaids were still sewing at the hairdressers. :eek:
One suggestion for would be wedding planners: any shop or service with the words Wedding or Bridal in it; avoid if possible, it’ll probably cost twice as much.
And I can recommend a scrummy alternative to white wedding cake (although I’ll mangle the spelling) Krukenbuch, a conical tower of hazelnut cream stuffed profiteroles smothered in toffee. Ours was over 4 feet tall (300 individual pastries), was devoured with great glee by all present, and still cost about 1/3 the price of a traditional cake.
I think that all totalled we (Phil, I and mothers) spent somewhere around $2000 on our wedding (that would include our first license and the dress I bought to elope in when we got frustrated 3 months before our actual set wedding date–we ended up waiting, but I kept the dress for the honeymoon). We had somewhere around 65 or 75 guests (I think we sent around 125 invitations). The biggest expenses were invitations, my dress, PLD’s tux, the photographer and the catered buffet (most of the rest of the expenses were pretty small).
My church didn’t charge us for either the ceremony nor the reception in the church atrium (we gave the pastor and my friend the musical director a gift for their services).
The flowers and other small decorations were a gift from one friend. Another friend and a family member each taped the ceremony/reception as our gift (we have two versions!). The cake was a gift from our pastors, who were both professional bakers to pay their bills, and included a pretty custom cake-topper I designed myself that one of the pastors created with the woman who did the flowers. My mother’s friends made the other finger-food sized desserts, and I made all the wedding favors myself. A mutual friend dj’ed for practically free (we gave him something).
PLD has often said he feels that the “wedding industry” (balloons, flowers, matchbooks, cardboxes, etc., etc.) is exploitative and starts couples out in unnecessary debt so I suspect he would’ve cut back even more, but I probably wouldn’t…I think it was a very modest wedding (most of my friends had the big formal sit-down dinner style weddings with 150-300 guests, etc.) and considering the photographer (at $700) was the most expensive single item with the caterering I think around the same or slightly less, we did pretty well with all the other expenses.
Well I’m getting married in a couple of weeks. My thought was to have a potluck beach barbeque, but my fiancee and her mother put their foot down and said “no way in hell.” My second idea was a nudist wedding and that was also shot down. No one even wanted to listen to my third idea. 
Her parents offered to pay for the wedding so we are having the traditional wedding, with ushers, bridesmaids, white dress, tuxedo, DJ (didn’t want to pay for a band), string musicians during the ceremony, etc… The way we saved money is by cutting down on the number of guests (not too difficult since we live in California and all of my family is in Europe, so the family attendance on my side is pretty small: parents, brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew.) The number of guests will probably be around 80. I’m not sure what the total cost will be and I don’t even want to think about it, but it’s in the thousands of dollars. Part of the cost will be because we choose an old house (old for California) for our ceremony/reception so it will be on the grounds of a “victorian house” with a fruit orchard and a rose garden. This being Southern California we’re not too worried about rain.
Alessan, don’t let the criticism bother you. Many people look down upon the expensive weddings, but I figure if that’s what someone wants, even if they want to go into debt to have it (I’m NOT saying that’s what you did), that’s their choice. Just because a wedding is expensive doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.
Your tradition is similar to the chinese and/or vietnamese weddings I’ve attended here in California. A very large number of guests, but the guests contribute a money gift to the newlyweds so the wedding (it is to be hoped) pays for itself.
Congratulations Mr. Obfusciatrist and Ms. Baglady!! Here’s wishing you many years of happiness. Did you get a free steak dinner with the ceremony? (I saw a sign once in Las Vegas offering a free steak dinner with your wedding.) I think you won the jackpot in more ways than one that day! 
P.S. An indiscreet question: what’s the last name situation? My fiancee and I had several long discussions on that subject (I even started a thread on it once.) I thought she should keep her maiden name, she wanted to take my name, and there was no end of debate. The final decision was that she would change her name.
An indiscrete question
My days are numbered. 15 to be exact.
I can give you a total about a week after that but I think we are doing good. Depending on how dinner shakes out we will have spent in the neighborhood of 4-5000 dollars. We went with Spider Mums for flowers and they look cool and they are cheap. That gets me past a hangup(money for flowers that will be thrown in the garbage)photographer for 500, DJ for 500. My Mom is the housekeeper for the priest so that helped. The marriage license being $75 pissed me off. You need a license to get married but anyone can have a kid!?!
Everyone asks me if I am getting nervous. Maybe once I stop writing checks out…
Anyway Congratulations!!!
We had something like a $10-$12k wedding, I think. My parents paid for most of it (his parents paid for photography and the rehearsal dinner). There were about 100 people.
On the topic of when to take photos, this is what we did: We were at an outdoor site for both the ceremony and the reception. The site was laid out in terraces, so there were four or five different areas, but you could easily see from one to another. So we served fresh fruit and muffins to everyone for an hour in one area while we had our pictures taken in another. We assigned a few people to make a determined effort to make sure that our families got to meet each other. People were welcome to come over and talk to us, take their own pictures, etc., while the photo taking was going on.
We also had a big photo of the two of us with matting about 7" wide, so everyone could sign the matting. (It currently hangs in our living room and is one of our most treasured possessions). We had wedding photographs from our parents, grandparents, and what great(xn)-grandparents we could find, with stories about the length of their marriages and their lives together on display (this made a nice conversation piece for people to talk about so they didn’t get bored). Once the photos were done, everyone trooped up to the wedding site, which was on the top terrace.
After the ceremony, we had asked them to line the path that went from there to the dance floor. We then did a “reverse reception line” down to the dancing area, and did our first dance. Then we put on music, opened the buffet, and let people dance, eat, whatever for the rest of the afternoon. A lot of people told us it was the most fun wedding they had ever attended.
-Elizabeth
Baglady and spouse, congrats. I would never again have a big wedding-the stress and what a waste of money. If I could do it again I would do what you did in a heartbeat. I have had lots of time to think about this. I am still married to the same person and my friends that got married at city hall have been married just as long. The wedding itself didn’t make any difference. I have friends who’s (parents just spent 10,000) and they were divorced in 10 months. ALESSAN-I know what you are talking about-actually I married into your culture. I still don’t get it but I can understand it. But it’s all about show and money.
Hmm…I guess my invitation got lost in the mail…
I got married this past October. I had the traditional Brooklyn Italian wedding. We spent about $12,000 for the hall and catering, $5000 for the limos, $3500 for the DJ, $4500 for the photographer, $1000 for flowers, $800 for my dress, $700 for the invitations, $350 for the church, and about another $2000 on miscellaneous expenses (garter, after-church catering, tips, hair and make-up, rehearsal dinner, favors). The total cost was just under $30,000., and that’s not counting the rings or the honeymoon.
Would I do it again? You bet!
Rose
Oh, and Congrats on your wedding!