How did you know my wedding is this weekend so I'm full of wedding planning skills I will (hopefully) never need again??
1) The Three Things thing is extremely true. My biggest Thing was a mimosa bar (we're having a brunch wedding). I'm so excited. I can't wait to have my fiance be my husband, but the mimosas are a close second.
2) Ignore Pinterest, stick to wedding subreddits if you need social media help. It will both give you good ideas (we're doing an instant camera guest book because I heard about it on reddit) and show you you're not the dumbest (I use this in a gender neutral sense) bitch in the game
3) On the flip side of the Three Things, make sure to list your "hell no" things - do you have an aunt you hate that will not be invited no matter what? Don't want to do a garter toss? (please for the love of god don't do a garter toss) make that clear to your partner!
4) Set boundaries. But have at least a modicum of respect for the person/people holding the purse strings (if it's not you). And (I learned) include your closest people without burdening them - your mom wants to feel useful!
Something we did, and I can't recommend enough - ask your photographer if they allow registry/gifting to pay toward their fees. We treasure our wedding photos far more than any gravy boat or tea service. It was perfect, because both our families were out of town, and a lot of people who couldn't attend all but covered our photography expense.
And I'll advocate for eloping, to an extent. Wifey and I got married in our living room (hooray our dog got to attend!), but then a few months later we did formal ceremony and reception. Especially later on in marriage when kids and their activities start to overwhelm the social calendar, it's good to have an excuse to do a few date nights each year.
This is awesome and made me think fondly of my wedding six years ago. I think “three things” were the live band (Brena in southeastern Michigan if y’all are around there. They’re amazing. We still get compliments on them! And they’re super nice guys), having one of our best friends who also happens to be a gifted orator officiate, and having family and friends play some music pre-ceremony and during it (they were stoked to get asked and they really put some effort into it. It ruled to have my friend play a song from Spirited Away on piano while Maho walked down the aisle).
And I would advise people who are getting married to take a moment every now and then throughout the day to pause, look around, and just soak in the moment and take a mental picture. It’s hard to slow down on a wedding day, but do it a bit! People are there because they love you and want to celebrate with you. They’ll get over it if you don’t make it a point to talk to every single table. I was given that advice and it rings so true today.
1. No matter what you think your three things will be, at least one of them will change on the day of the event. Roll with the fun and see what happens.
2. If you're having a wedding at a place that has a full bar, make sure the bartenders know exactly what the boundaries are. My friends downed several bottles of Crown Royal Black at what was supposed to be a well-only bar at my sister's wedding.
3. Make sure to factor accessibility into your venue choices. If you have multiple grandparents who have mobility issues, for example, consider _not_ having your wedding in a wooded area with lots of tree roots to step over or _not_ having your reception in a multi-level venue with no elevator.
4. Don't be afraid to exclude asshole relatives. Just because they're family doesn't mean you have to let them spoil your good time.
I am in the middle of planning a wedding right now (June 24th! Mostly outside!) and I had no idea such a fresh, unspoiled hell awaited me my entire life. A small debate of ours is about whether we really need a fancy wedding cake. I say sheet cake and some Italian cookies.
You're gonna not care about some things. Identify them early on, keep them secret, and then generously delegate them to the well-meaning but overbearing family members who insist on "helping" in their own very specific and probably not actually helpful ways. They're happy you let them help and the thing you didn't want to deal with is handled.
Also try to accept as early as possible that some of your planning decisions will disappoint or otherwise bother people and that it's totally fine because it's not their wedding (cc: the grandmother who was SHOCKED that we didn't do a receiving line in the year of our Lord 2018, the fourteen times my mother in law just wanted to double check that we were still absolutely refusing a garter toss, our baffled extended families when a dozen of us did the -entire- Alabama student section version of "Dixieland Delight"). This does get more complicated if opinionated people who aren't you are contributing financially, so be mindful of that.
Dumb, throwaway piece of advice? If you are feeding people more than passed hors d'oeuvres, they will sit down and they will likely not relinquish their chairs and so you need to have at least as many chairs as you have butts. There was a stretch where every single wedding we went to assumed people would eat and give up their chairs and the image of my octogenarian great-aunt and great-uncle huddled on the side of the cake table eating their dinner because the groom's family had claimed all the chairs is going to be burned into my brain forever.
Strongly agree on the "three things" - you'll have to ask others, but the target for us was food.
We had a mashed potato bar during the cocktail(really, picture) hour, we had a very good dinner, we had late-night fried mac and cheese bites and pretzels, and our wedding favors were mini-pies (three flavors! I really wanted pie at the wedding).
We made one of our things the food, and people are still telling us about it three years on. Including people who attended both our wedding and the ~400 head extravaganza one of my wife's second cousins had a year and a half later. Our venue is owned by a group that owns a couple restaurants in town and they did all the cooking at the restaurant (right around the corner).
We did hire a DJ because the venue was originally an old jail and has an unconventional layout (thing 2) so we got the guy with experience making the place sound good but I did provide him a playlist.
If you're anything like me you will spend the entire planning process complaining about how insanely expensive it all is. Do not do this in front of your partner, who correctly justifies those highway robbery markups in context of how important the event is.
Spot on. I always tell folks that three things are going to go "wrong" on your wedding day, and they will be so small in the overall context of the occasion that nobody will notice but you. So don't worry about it.
At ours, the boutonnieres arrived one shade off. Honestly, I wouldn't have known except that Mrs DG freaked out about it. More memorably, wedding cake icing comes in two basic forms -- structural or tasty. We opted for tasty, but the downside of that was that on a 95F day in the DC suburbs, the entire cake started leaning like the Tower of Pisa during the lunch and well before cake cutting time. My college classmates amused themselves trying to calculate the angle of lean and figuring out exactly how long they could let it go before they'd need to call someone over to prevent a collapse. That probably became one of the Three Things for them, and hopefully they still get a good laugh out of it.
Beware using only advanced statistics! Probability of Attendance is still a developing field. Yes, there's the "number" but you've also got to consider if your guest "got that dawg in them." Learn from me, you've got to make allowances for your mom's dear, dear, decades-long friend who lives down the street but will accidentally write the wrong weekend down on her calendar. (The upside was that my college roommate, Dan, got to eat the extra dinners.)
You can DIY the flowers if you get fake ones! I love that my bouquet still looks the same 7 years later, and I put it together myself on the cheap.
The Three Memorable Things is so true! People still talk about the steak from our venue’s caterer, but the one we did on purpose was a more-or-less personalized LEGO minifig for each guest (we had about 85 incl bridal party). We bought bags of legs and torsos, then an assortment of heads and hair and spent 2 nights creating our guests as closet as we could. It was a lot of fun and people LOVED them.
The Three Things! Oh, so true. Ours were Band (had to be rockin'), Bars (enough to ensure that our 180 guests never had to wait for a drink--we had 5) and Food (lots of options, top notch).
We did great with all three, EXCEPT somehow the facilities/catering manager convinced us to pay for alcohol by the drink and not per person. Had I paid close attention to this detail (I am detail-oriented in my job and nowhere else), I would have said, emphatically, "Have you MET our friends?!"
The facilities managers checked their records after the weekend and confirmed that our guests drank more alcohol, per person, than any other group of our size in the history of that venue. I hope, 15.5 years later, that our record still holds.
We were somewhat lucky- between my wife and I, we’ve been in ~25 weddings (...I account for three of that number...). Seeing everything close up like that, we had a really good idea of what was important and what was a good Pinterest idea but was not worth the effort in the end
As a 39-year-old now married for 12 years, there's a lot I'd do differently, but our three things ...
People were in to our carrot wedding cake, our band (the Jangling Reinharts of Richmond, VA) kept the dance floor going, and we had our ceremony outside at the end of March in VA where it can either be 39 or 89, and it was definitely chilly -- but at least memorable!
People also remember us running out of allotted wine almost immediately (a groomsman bought us more) and that I cried buckets during the ceremony.
I'd have maybe picked a different venue. We ended up at a decent-looking hotel for ease of use for the guests, but it wasn't memorable on its own in the slightest.
When selecting the hotel for the guests to stay after the reception, please make sure you do not have to cross a bridge that goes over a small brook. Just on the off chance that a nor’easter blows through on your wedding day and dumps 5” of rain and as you’re headed back to the hotel there is a fire truck blocking the road saying the bridge has washed out and nobody can access the hotel leaving a bulk of your 20 something year old guests having to find floor space at your new in-laws house.
Geography is important here. Scout the land before picking the hotel. Hire a survey company if you must.
How did you know my wedding is this weekend so I'm full of wedding planning skills I will (hopefully) never need again??
1) The Three Things thing is extremely true. My biggest Thing was a mimosa bar (we're having a brunch wedding). I'm so excited. I can't wait to have my fiance be my husband, but the mimosas are a close second.
2) Ignore Pinterest, stick to wedding subreddits if you need social media help. It will both give you good ideas (we're doing an instant camera guest book because I heard about it on reddit) and show you you're not the dumbest (I use this in a gender neutral sense) bitch in the game
3) On the flip side of the Three Things, make sure to list your "hell no" things - do you have an aunt you hate that will not be invited no matter what? Don't want to do a garter toss? (please for the love of god don't do a garter toss) make that clear to your partner!
4) Set boundaries. But have at least a modicum of respect for the person/people holding the purse strings (if it's not you). And (I learned) include your closest people without burdening them - your mom wants to feel useful!
One of the benefits I did not anticipate with this newsletter subscription was the ability to indirectly crowdsource wedding tips. Thanks, Scott!
Something we did, and I can't recommend enough - ask your photographer if they allow registry/gifting to pay toward their fees. We treasure our wedding photos far more than any gravy boat or tea service. It was perfect, because both our families were out of town, and a lot of people who couldn't attend all but covered our photography expense.
And I'll advocate for eloping, to an extent. Wifey and I got married in our living room (hooray our dog got to attend!), but then a few months later we did formal ceremony and reception. Especially later on in marriage when kids and their activities start to overwhelm the social calendar, it's good to have an excuse to do a few date nights each year.
Scott,
This is awesome and made me think fondly of my wedding six years ago. I think “three things” were the live band (Brena in southeastern Michigan if y’all are around there. They’re amazing. We still get compliments on them! And they’re super nice guys), having one of our best friends who also happens to be a gifted orator officiate, and having family and friends play some music pre-ceremony and during it (they were stoked to get asked and they really put some effort into it. It ruled to have my friend play a song from Spirited Away on piano while Maho walked down the aisle).
And I would advise people who are getting married to take a moment every now and then throughout the day to pause, look around, and just soak in the moment and take a mental picture. It’s hard to slow down on a wedding day, but do it a bit! People are there because they love you and want to celebrate with you. They’ll get over it if you don’t make it a point to talk to every single table. I was given that advice and it rings so true today.
My tips:
1. No matter what you think your three things will be, at least one of them will change on the day of the event. Roll with the fun and see what happens.
2. If you're having a wedding at a place that has a full bar, make sure the bartenders know exactly what the boundaries are. My friends downed several bottles of Crown Royal Black at what was supposed to be a well-only bar at my sister's wedding.
3. Make sure to factor accessibility into your venue choices. If you have multiple grandparents who have mobility issues, for example, consider _not_ having your wedding in a wooded area with lots of tree roots to step over or _not_ having your reception in a multi-level venue with no elevator.
4. Don't be afraid to exclude asshole relatives. Just because they're family doesn't mean you have to let them spoil your good time.
I am in the middle of planning a wedding right now (June 24th! Mostly outside!) and I had no idea such a fresh, unspoiled hell awaited me my entire life. A small debate of ours is about whether we really need a fancy wedding cake. I say sheet cake and some Italian cookies.
You're gonna not care about some things. Identify them early on, keep them secret, and then generously delegate them to the well-meaning but overbearing family members who insist on "helping" in their own very specific and probably not actually helpful ways. They're happy you let them help and the thing you didn't want to deal with is handled.
Also try to accept as early as possible that some of your planning decisions will disappoint or otherwise bother people and that it's totally fine because it's not their wedding (cc: the grandmother who was SHOCKED that we didn't do a receiving line in the year of our Lord 2018, the fourteen times my mother in law just wanted to double check that we were still absolutely refusing a garter toss, our baffled extended families when a dozen of us did the -entire- Alabama student section version of "Dixieland Delight"). This does get more complicated if opinionated people who aren't you are contributing financially, so be mindful of that.
Dumb, throwaway piece of advice? If you are feeding people more than passed hors d'oeuvres, they will sit down and they will likely not relinquish their chairs and so you need to have at least as many chairs as you have butts. There was a stretch where every single wedding we went to assumed people would eat and give up their chairs and the image of my octogenarian great-aunt and great-uncle huddled on the side of the cake table eating their dinner because the groom's family had claimed all the chairs is going to be burned into my brain forever.
Strongly agree on the "three things" - you'll have to ask others, but the target for us was food.
We had a mashed potato bar during the cocktail(really, picture) hour, we had a very good dinner, we had late-night fried mac and cheese bites and pretzels, and our wedding favors were mini-pies (three flavors! I really wanted pie at the wedding).
We made one of our things the food, and people are still telling us about it three years on. Including people who attended both our wedding and the ~400 head extravaganza one of my wife's second cousins had a year and a half later. Our venue is owned by a group that owns a couple restaurants in town and they did all the cooking at the restaurant (right around the corner).
We did hire a DJ because the venue was originally an old jail and has an unconventional layout (thing 2) so we got the guy with experience making the place sound good but I did provide him a playlist.
If you're anything like me you will spend the entire planning process complaining about how insanely expensive it all is. Do not do this in front of your partner, who correctly justifies those highway robbery markups in context of how important the event is.
"Something is going to go wrong and that’s fine."
Spot on. I always tell folks that three things are going to go "wrong" on your wedding day, and they will be so small in the overall context of the occasion that nobody will notice but you. So don't worry about it.
At ours, the boutonnieres arrived one shade off. Honestly, I wouldn't have known except that Mrs DG freaked out about it. More memorably, wedding cake icing comes in two basic forms -- structural or tasty. We opted for tasty, but the downside of that was that on a 95F day in the DC suburbs, the entire cake started leaning like the Tower of Pisa during the lunch and well before cake cutting time. My college classmates amused themselves trying to calculate the angle of lean and figuring out exactly how long they could let it go before they'd need to call someone over to prevent a collapse. That probably became one of the Three Things for them, and hopefully they still get a good laugh out of it.
Beware using only advanced statistics! Probability of Attendance is still a developing field. Yes, there's the "number" but you've also got to consider if your guest "got that dawg in them." Learn from me, you've got to make allowances for your mom's dear, dear, decades-long friend who lives down the street but will accidentally write the wrong weekend down on her calendar. (The upside was that my college roommate, Dan, got to eat the extra dinners.)
You can DIY the flowers if you get fake ones! I love that my bouquet still looks the same 7 years later, and I put it together myself on the cheap.
The Three Memorable Things is so true! People still talk about the steak from our venue’s caterer, but the one we did on purpose was a more-or-less personalized LEGO minifig for each guest (we had about 85 incl bridal party). We bought bags of legs and torsos, then an assortment of heads and hair and spent 2 nights creating our guests as closet as we could. It was a lot of fun and people LOVED them.
The Three Things! Oh, so true. Ours were Band (had to be rockin'), Bars (enough to ensure that our 180 guests never had to wait for a drink--we had 5) and Food (lots of options, top notch).
We did great with all three, EXCEPT somehow the facilities/catering manager convinced us to pay for alcohol by the drink and not per person. Had I paid close attention to this detail (I am detail-oriented in my job and nowhere else), I would have said, emphatically, "Have you MET our friends?!"
The facilities managers checked their records after the weekend and confirmed that our guests drank more alcohol, per person, than any other group of our size in the history of that venue. I hope, 15.5 years later, that our record still holds.
We were somewhat lucky- between my wife and I, we’ve been in ~25 weddings (...I account for three of that number...). Seeing everything close up like that, we had a really good idea of what was important and what was a good Pinterest idea but was not worth the effort in the end
As a 39-year-old now married for 12 years, there's a lot I'd do differently, but our three things ...
People were in to our carrot wedding cake, our band (the Jangling Reinharts of Richmond, VA) kept the dance floor going, and we had our ceremony outside at the end of March in VA where it can either be 39 or 89, and it was definitely chilly -- but at least memorable!
People also remember us running out of allotted wine almost immediately (a groomsman bought us more) and that I cried buckets during the ceremony.
I'd have maybe picked a different venue. We ended up at a decent-looking hotel for ease of use for the guests, but it wasn't memorable on its own in the slightest.
When selecting the hotel for the guests to stay after the reception, please make sure you do not have to cross a bridge that goes over a small brook. Just on the off chance that a nor’easter blows through on your wedding day and dumps 5” of rain and as you’re headed back to the hotel there is a fire truck blocking the road saying the bridge has washed out and nobody can access the hotel leaving a bulk of your 20 something year old guests having to find floor space at your new in-laws house.
Geography is important here. Scout the land before picking the hotel. Hire a survey company if you must.