I did my planning in six months - and moved in the process.
I got all the wedding planning lists - and then methodically went through them with a black magic marker and put a nice fat line through things I didn’t want in my wedding, didn’t want to mess around with, or didn’t apply to my situation. Cut down that list by a whole bunch, let me tell you!
No printed napkins, thick black line. No wedding favors, thick black line. Planning to take our honeymoon sometime in the spring after our fall wedding, thick black lines through lots of things!
There are lots of things that are optional at weddings. The only things that are mandatory are you, your SO, and two witnesses to sign the license in the presence of a duly-appointed officiant. Lots of people will tell you “OMG you have to have _________!!1!!one!!!” This is a lie. You can have it if you want, but if you don’t then I give you free license to use the phrase I used most often during planning my wedding “My goodness! We’ll certainly keep that in mind!”
Did the wedding dress shopping as a weekend trip with my maid of honor. By the way, I can’t recommend the formal wear section of large department stores enough - I wore a white cocktail dress to my wedding. It was gorgeous, exactly what I wanted, and cost me less than 100 bucks - alterations included by the store for free as a matter of store policy. Evening wear is quite frequently substantially discounted if you’re not getting married within a month or two of Prom or Homecoming. Department stores typically have a fairly wide range of styles and sizes - which is less the case with bridal boutiques. Also, in my experience, the ladies that work in bridal boutiques are bitchy, condescending witches.
That reminded me of another tip I have to share. We stumbled across a great dress around first communion time for my niece who was our flower girl. The department stores have tons of adorable white dresses for little girls at a fraction of the cost a flower girl dress goes for at the bridal shop.
Everything is cheaper than a boutique. Even custom dressmakers can be cheaper than boutique-bought bridal gowns.
And, the price of one-stop shopping for wedding stuff is, well, a price – in dollars.
I can’t speak highly enough of the thick black magic marker approach listed above. I would heartily endorse skipping anything that might lead to all of the women in your family sitting around a table in the middle of the night, tying tiny little bows on tiny litte bags of anything.
Find out early if your wedding hall allows candles. If so, consider using candlelight or helium in your centerpieces (if any) rather than flowers. One of the most fun, medium-budget wedding receptions I ever attended had centerpieces of helium balloons tied to tiny baskets weighted (under rose petals) with marbles or gravel or something. It may just have been because so many of the guests were physics students, but in fairly short order the dance floor was being patrolled by festive zeppelins, and the long-haried men had balloons tied to the end of their hair, so that it was standing straight up. Waltzing caused terrible tangles, but it made for some great, if not dignified, photographs.
If you are not big on dancing, you might want to consider a morning wedding. They are unusual in the United States, but they are a great excuse for women to wear big, showy hats and a great way to be elegant but keep costs for food and alcohol down. (Brunch, even a festive brunch, is a cheap and easy meal to put together, whether catered or not. And champagne is all you “need” to provide, alcohol-wise – and people don’t go through much of it before noon. Generally.) Tuxedos, obviously, would be inappropriate for a morning wedding. (Though grey morning jackets are not. You would have the choice of going either more casual or more English in your wardrobe choices.)
For your guests’ comfort, don’t run out of food and don’t run out of alcohol (if you provide it at all – and better in most cases to avoid the issue than to do a cash bar.) Your guests wil lnot care if they get a bag of birdseed or a bottle of bubbles or if there are gold tassles on a chair cover or if the centerpiece is gardenias or daisies or non-existant. The most awkward experience for a guest (barring some really good stories of special, awkward moments) is a sense of being entertained beyond the means of his/her host.
If you can go into the planning process with an open mind and an interest in what the market has to provide, you can pull together a great event at a pretty good price. It’s just when brides get caught up in buying stuff intended specifically for brides or when they’ve been dreaming since they were seven of having one particular kind of tulip that is only available by special back-order to the bulb in Holland at the season of the wedding that brides get realy emotionally manipulated or ripped off by the bridal industry.
Keep the cost/benefit, bang/buck questions in your mind at all times and (other than that piece of advice, of course) don’t let anyone tell you what you have to do on your “big day”.
Being able to say, “okay then, chicken instead of shrimp”, “no, it’s not worth $6 per stem to me to have spray roses” or “one classical guitarist instead of a chamber ensemble sounds dandy for the cocktail hour” or “I don’t give a rat’s ass about wedding cakes; I want pie” (all merely for example) is a valuable exercise and it shows in the ease of the day, the comfort of the guests, and the bottom line.
Absolutely. My maid of honour and I 9should that be ‘me’?) spent a gleeful half-hour crossing out all the stupid suggestions in a wedding planner guide. I think it was Martha Stewart’s Wedding magazine.
Breathe deeply, keep it simple, remember that the wedding’ll be fun but if anything goes wrong, it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re married at the end of it. Mothers almost invariably go kind of berserk.
Actually, many female relatives do. Try to ignore them. It’s your wedding, and should be fun, not too stressful. Please, please don’t do the ‘Take off the garter with teeth’ thing. Or the Dollar Dance.
Here’s a simple thing to remember, from the groom’s perspective at least: The Wedding Day in the long run will be a nice memory, but not a reason to get stressed, strained or go broke over.
What’s important is the person across the aisle from you.
They do. But you know what? The most important thing about your wedding is, at the end of it, you’ll be married. That’s a lot more important than any of the details of the wedding.
I count as a success any wedding where the couple ends up married, most of the family members are still speaking to each other afterward, and nobody gets arrested or injured. The rest is gravy.
Face up to it now: you won’t have a perfect wedding. There will be something that someone wishes you had done differently. Don’t try for perfect- try for “good enough”.
If there’s something you really don’t want to do at your wedding, put your foot down on it and don’t let anyone pressure you into doing it. I didn’t want to toss the bouquet or garter, because going up to catch the bouquet always reminded me that I was single and not particularly happy about that, and I think the garter thing is tacky. I didn’t do either of those. Mr. Neville and I didn’t feed each other cake, either, though my MIL wanted us to smash cake in each other’s faces (ugh- super tacky).
Here’s the one piece of advice I wish someone had given me – this should be your mantra:
As long as we’re married by the end of the day, it’s a successful wedding.*
*For some families, you might need to add something here, such as: “and everyone is still speaking to each other,” or, “and no one is in jail,” or something like that. YMMV.
I agree with everything Tabula Rasa says (I’m an event planner, too). The only other things I think are important are the ceremony (that’s what this is all about, after all – make it meaningful to you! Change words from the traditional, or back to the traditional! Make it yours.) and the photographer. I’m not saying you should break the bank on the photog, but the pictures are what you’ll have when it’s all over – it’s worth some money and some time to get the photographer who’s right for you.
Congratulations! HAVE FUN! …and call him your fiance as often as you can, since that title has a limited lifespan!
Photographer suggestion… Wedding photographers all offer the same packages of the same pictures, blah blah boring. And they are expensive. See if your local portraitist will do weddings. That’s what we did, and ended up paying less than a third of what all the Wedding Professional Photographers were charging us.
When hubby and I got engaged, my mother was in late stage, terminal lung cancer. I wanted to get married while she was still alive to see it. Because of this, we had a ten week engagement, and a shoestring budget (my parents had crushing medical bills to deal with; they couldn’t go spending a lot of money on a wedding. My mom contributed $100.00 towards the cost of the cake; everything else was on us). Here are some of the ways we saved money (and still had a very nice wedding, I think):
I bought my gown at a plus-size dress shop right after prom season. Yep, it was a white prom gown.
I did the attendant’s bouquets myself, out of silk flowers.
We each only had three attendants.
We had the wedding right in the reception hall.
A distant relative with good camera skills did the photos.
Like someone upthread said, it was actually kind of easier having such a short engagement, because I didn’t have time to sweat the small stuff!
