At this point, I’d rather elope.
Chef and I agreed to the wedding-esque business knowing that our families would kill us if we ran off and did the deed without them, and as such I’m a terrible glowing bride. Chef and I have done exactly nothing to plan the wedding, despite the date looming somewhere in Fall, other than requesting a packet from the intended reception hall that we have yet to receive. We aren’t going to have a proper wedding anyway, just hoping for a casual foodie reception and a kickass honeymoon*, and my only caveat to the reception is that any music played after 1950 must expressly be approved by yours truly. The DJ that plays “The Chicken Dance” doesn’t get paid.
If you were invited to a reception, sans wedding, what would you expect? Where should the money be spent?** Any of the usual oratory displays and toasts necessary? What the hell do you do?
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* Don’t you hate wedding vocab?
** Booze is a given.
Actually, this business of receptions without weddings has a long history. Very common when, for whatever reason, the bride is unable to be married from home.
You do whatever you want to do. I raised a toast at my wedding, because I wanted to. It made everyone cry, but everyone knew my father was dying, so it was easy.
That’s the fun part about getting married these days: you can do whatever you want, and if anyone gives you the slightest hint of attitude, you can hark back to some ancient religious or ethnic heritage, whatever’s convenient.
I’m with Kaethe — make the celebration yours.
The most important thing is that we, as your friends, get to share in your lawful bonding and get to watch the two of you get shitfaced and talk incoherently into the microphone and say things you shouldn’t say. This is going to be fucking awesome, Lauren.
(And let me give an early thank you for regulating the music.)
Just think of it as a party (that’s what we’re doing). A party where family gets invited, and some people give moving/embarassing toasts. Very short ceremony, followed by dinner, then music and boozing and revelry. Depending on the jurisdiction, you can get a friend to officiate — takes 15 minutes on the web for anyone to get “ordained,” as far as legalisms are concerned. And we’re forgoing the DJ for music from an iPod, but that’s just us.
I have a brother who has all my wedding DJ equipment. He’s done quite a few wedding receptions and parties, and so far as I know, is planning on continuing that in lieu of a real job for at least a little while longer.
Let me know if you’d like his contact info, and I’ll pass it along!
The wedding stuff can get to you occasionally. You might want to check out the forums at indiebride, they tend to have a lot of good advice for all sorts of combinations of traditional/nontraditional stuff.
I went to one wedding reception that wasn’t also a wedding. It was nice, the only thing that was odd was that they didn’t tell anyone they were already married until we got there.
For the love of Pete, whatever you do, don’t tell them it’s a wedding when you rent the hall, hire the caterers, whatever.
“Wedding” = blood in the water. They’ll jack up the prices because they know it’s Your Specialllll Daaaaayyyy. If they think it’s just a party, they’ll charge you accordingly.
My cousin had a wedding reception at a lovely B&B on Lake Champlain that was nice but not terribly expensive (the main feature was the whole being-on-the-lake thing). For one thing, the B&B was used only for the bathrooms and the kitchens; the reception was outside. Also, the food was simple: Kabobs! and pilaf! with salad on the side. (Kabobs! came in beef, chicken and swordfish variety; I’m sure a veggie option could be worked out, maybe tofu).
Honestly the booze is the only thing that matters. The reception could be in your backyard with a keg of PBR and we would all have a blast. Keep it simple and cheap, use all the extra money for your kickass honeymoon.
Banning the chicken dance is the best news ever!
If you need a cheap place for a reception, my friend Rachael had her wedding/reception at the Merro Grotto for around $300. They have a disco ball with Ali Baba on it, and to be honest no wedding/reception is complete without a disco ball.
I’m asking the same kinds of questions. I don’t have a ton of advice to offer (still searching for my own answers), but here are a couple thoughts:
Spend the money on the stuff that matters most to you. It’s your party, right? I’m skipping flowers because I don’t care about flowers, and I plan to do reception music through playlists on my iPod, because I’m allergic to DJs and live music is impractical for my setting. My budget is weighted heavily towards food and photography, because those things are important to me.
Look at alternative venues. I’m having my wedding in my parents’ backyard. No rental fee! Score! You could totally do your reception at a favorite restaurant, at a friend or relative’s house, at a gallery, at a zoo… No reason to stick to reception halls unless that’s what you want.
Shift the burden. My mom is really anxious about hotel accomodations for the out-of-town guests. So I’m asking her to deal with that.
I hope this is helpful advice, rather than irritating advice.
Oh, yeah–pictures, too.
I basically did what you want to do. I had a very intimate ceremony, where my cousin (a judge) married us in front of our immediate families in my parents’ living room. Then, we had the kickass reception.
Like Revena might do, we used our own music. We made a bunch of mix CDs and put them on shuffle, and it was great! The important thing for us was food and drink, so that’s where we spent the money. (Mmmmmm, middle eastern buffet!) We had a cake from our favorite local bakery, only because they made the yummiest cake in town and not because they specialized in those inedible cardboard wedding cakes that cost several months rent.
All of the guests commented on how ours was the best wedding they’d been to in a long time, because it was so relaxed. Maybe they say that for all weddings, but it really worked for us. And that’s what matters!
I’ve had four weddings: three quite plush, one on the ultra-cheap. Folks need to be fed and watered, but they don’t need shrimp skewers or expensive champagne. They need not to be starving or thirsty.
One of my favorite weddings served water, soft drinks, and two-buck Chuck and nothing else. We toasted with Martinellis. If it cost a grand, I’d be surprised. And they had a friend — me — who had one of those minister’s licenses, and did the thing for free.
The wedding stuff can get out of hand really quickly. We also planned to elope, but likewise, our parents would have had a fit. We ended up with 60 guests, which was too many for a backyard/house reception, so we had to rent a space. We had literally a 5-minute “ceremony” with the greatest officiant ever in a community center that used to be a public library, which the reception in the same place. If you don’t have a friend do it, just make sure that you like the officiant and that he/she’s willing to do what you want. That was more important to us than I thought it’d be initially. We got married, signed the papers, and then partied.
Most of our wedding was the reception, which people actually thanked us for afterwards - everybody likes a party, but they also got to see the rings being exchanged and stuff. Quickly. We ended up spending the most money on alcohol, because our people appreciate that and, frankly, so did I. If you’re going to have a full-on meal (we had a lot of out-of-town guests so we wanted to feed them), brunch can be a hell of a lot cheaper than dinner through some caterers. We didn’t have a “wedding cake”, just several varieties of cake from a good local bakery. Make sure you get to eat some of your own cake, though. We didn’t get to, and we’re both still irked about it :) We didn’t have toasts or anything at the reception, just dancing, drinking, and eating, and it worked well for us.
A good DJ should ask you for a list of songs you definitley don’t want to have played, or should at least be gald if you offer it. Some DJs we talked to told us they didn’t play crap like the Chicken Dance unless the couple requested it. We had them play mostly music from the 40s-60s, and that was good for us.
I hung around IndieBride a lot when we were planning the wedding, but frankly, any wedding crap, even “indie” wedding crap, made me feel like I wasn’t doing it “right” or doing enough. I tried to avoid that stuff and just think about what we wanted and what we could afford. I will say that planning any big event was more effort than I thought it would be. I recruited my Mom to help (she is of the “if you’re old enough to get married, you can do it yourself” school) and having that kind of help was invaluable.
Sorry to be so long-winded :)
If your party will be on the small-medium size (under 50), you may like to know what we did: Reserved the group/banquet room at a nice restaurant, threw ourselves an “engagement party”, and invited a friend who was also qualified to marry us legally. Before the first course, we stood up to welcome our guests and then asked our friend to speak. When he started to read the vows, our guests began to realize that we were skipping right to the wedding. It was a great surprise and cost us around $2800 total for a multi-course dinner with wine service. The best part of this scenario was the ease with which it could be planned, and because it was mostly a surprise, there was no pressure from parents or other well-intended folk to do something differently. After dinner, we went out for drinks with our friends and our parents and grandparents were able to hang out before going back to their homes or hotels. It was a very-low stress event.
“A good DJ should ask you for a list of songs you definitley don’t want to have played, or should at least be gald if you offer it. Some DJs we talked to told us they didn’t play crap like the Chicken Dance unless the couple requested it. We had them play mostly music from the 40s-60s, and that was good for us. ”
Damn straight. I *always* asked people for up to three lists, as they saw fit: Songs you absolutely want to hear, songs you absolutely don’t want to hear, and songs you’d like to have your dances to. I always apologized for adding more things to their to-do list, but explained that having those made it easy for me to make sure they had the kind of music they wanted. And also because drunk people get really belligerent when you don’t play their songs, and having that blacklist there made it really easy to go “See, they’re the ones paying me, and it says right here not to play it. Go away.”*
And yeah, aside from standards like Moonlight Serenade, I generally kept it 50s - 80s unless people were requesting current pop stuff or whatever. The lists tended to let you know what people liked and what they didn’t. Good times.
If you have a 5-disc changer attached to your stereo, the mix-tapes-on-shuffle thing could also work out well. I’m wary of interactive methods of music selection (other than DJ-based) because drunk people can also get belligerent when other drunk people fuck with the playlist.
I like how I’m assuming people are going to be drunk at your reception… ;)
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* - I never mentioned this last part explicitly; I assumed it was understood.
I went to a friends wedding celebration last year who had married the year before at the JOP office, but then caved to her mother’s demands for a party. She did send out invitations (she wanted to just do email but did this just for the head count for the caterers). The only vaguely wedding-ish thing she did was cut the wedding cake her mother had ordered. Otherwise it was just a backyard party with really nice catered food. The married couple wore regular casual clothes and tried to mingle as much as possible. There was a tent/DJ (again, her mother) but no one really danced. Some people were confused about the event b/c couple was already married - when I was asked what was going to happen I said “really I think its just a party.” It was lots of fun though!
My sister who did have a semi-traditional wedding (church/reception hall) cut out lots of things she didn’t want to do - buy flowers, toss bouquet, had cupcakes instead of a wedding cake - so bottom line do whatever you want! Congratulations!!
I’ve got two words for you: ice. luge.
I’m given up planning my wedding to due rampant apathy about being married, and have so dropped the torch that my cousin handed to me: that of a three-foot tall ice sculpture that guests can do shots off of.
Sorry to give more unsolicited advice, but…
We did the print-’em-yourself invitiations package from Staples. Some of them are kind of vile (in my opinion), but they have a lot of nice, simple designs. I’ve heard some people say that the printer ink makes up the difference between the cost of having them done professionally. I can only assume those people have huge weddings. All I know is, our invitations, response cards, envelopes and labels cost us a grand total of about $40 and took us one afternoon to complete.
I like how I’m assuming people are going to be drunk at your reception… ;)
Well, about half of the people there are in the restaurant industry so I’m anticipating the same.
my only caveat to the reception is that any music played after 1950 must expressly be approved by yours truly.
are you talking about navy time? any music played after 7:50 pm must be approved by you?
or is your wedding going to be held partly in the 1920’s and partly in the 2000’s?
congrats, lauren!
Go to Hawaii, like I’ve told you a million times. The wedding should be about you guys and not about your friends.
Buy a kegs and a bag of charcoal and a hundred hot dogs, and spend the rest of the money on housing.
Love, Captain Prosaic.
Our wedding reception had about 80 guests and was held in a community center that used to be a psychiatric institution (great place to get committed!).
We saved money by using our friends and family as unpaid labor. We bought 600 roses from a friend’s brother’s floral wholesale company, and my mother, mother-in-law, husband, and I cleaned them ourselves and made simple bouquets for my sister and me. The rest of them we dumped on our friends right before the reception and let them put them wherever they wanted: they ended up everywhere and the kids gathered them up, used them as swords in swordfights, etc.
We bought white christmas lights right after the holidays and also tossed them at our friends to do with as they like. My family set up the chairs and tables. We hired the caterers for only an hour. We rented plates and did our own busing. That was kind of annoying because my husband is a little compulsive about cleaning and ended up, in my opinion, spending too much time busing and too little time dancing with me. We should have sprung for at least a couple of the catering staff staying the evening.
We hired a bartender but bought all our liquor at the liquor store. The wine we made ourselves at one of those make-your-own wine places.
I kept pretty detailed financial records. Overall, between us, my father, and my mother-in-law, we spent about $9k CDN on the ceremony (including marriage fees, clothes, etc) and the reception. It’s a lot of money, to be sure, but much less than most people spend. Most of that was on the food, since that was what we decided was important to us.
Definitely look into a restaurant, especially if you are a foodie.
Think about and discuss together what is important to *both of you* and base your desires around that. Decide on a budget and where to spend the money. Food and alcohol most important? Budget more for that. Flowers not so important? Budget less, or cut entirely.
I managed to have a wedding in a borough of New York for under $6000 total, and that was for *everything*! We cut limos, dj/band, and had a sit down at a restaurant with great food where people could actually talk to each other.
But you and your beloved are the ones who need to make these decisions. Don’t allow any parents or relatives to guilt you into something you don’t want!
*hugs* Best of luck to both of you!
you don’t know me, but i couldn’t resist. we had such a cheap and classy and fun wedding! ok, maybe classy is a stretch, but it was loads of fun.
we rented a B&B in napa, with enough room in the downstairs for a short ceremony and reception for about 50. i made my dress so it could be just perfect [and cheap], and almost didn’t finish in time, except i did. my sister and i catered — a buffet of stuffed grape leaves, quiche, meats, cheeses, fresh bread, fruit, salad. sister borrowed wine glasses from her work, and we did the decorations and flowers ourselves. it sounds like a lot of do-it-yourself, but was manageable — we didn’t have much money and we all had a lot of fun! ordered a cake and bought wine. oh, yeah, and found a minister through the B&B — we could have fallen back on a sister’s then-boyfriend’s mail-order ministry, but we just let him play piano. and all my sisters put together a tape of music for the reception, so i did not have veto rights. but it was the best day ever.
We spent our money on three things:
- Photography
- Food
- Booze
We wanted great photography because the day was us with our nearest and dearest, and we wanted the best pictures we could get. Good food and booze are self-explanatory.
We went more traditional than most people here — we had a ceremony at a cute Unitarian Universalist church (15 minutes, tops) at 11 a.m. and then hosted a lunch for 40 of our nearest and dearest at a restaurant’s private room.
My parents threw a second reception for us in our home state (we live in California) and they spent all their money on food and decor. The dessert table that was constantly stocked with new and different bite-size desserts was a HUGE hit.
And if you’re having little kids, don’t count out the Chicken Dance. It’s pretty awesome to watch a bunch of little kids giggle their way through it. We had about 15 munchkins at the second reception, so we had the Hokey-Pokey, the Chicken Dance AND “YMCA,” three songs I thought I’d never want to hear.
OH OH I KNOW.
1. you should let your mom set a date two weeks from now and then scramble around trying to meet that deadline, all because she wants to get the cardinal (i.e. the big-honking-deal clergyman) to do your service and he’s a very important man with a tight schedule, don’t you know.
2. you should let your fiance’s family choose all the bridesmaids, flower girls, ring bearer, etc., because you are trying to get to know them better and this will somehow aid in doing so.
3. when your relatives who are visiting from abroad (and who received your two-weeks-notice while traveling) pull out the dress-up clothes they happen to have packed, make sure to make frowny faces to indicate you’re skeptical those clothes will be nice enough. pull out lots of old dresses of yours that have, say, sequins or animal print on them, until they agree to go out and buy a suitable dress instead. then make them go back to the store and do it a second time. then make them wear your old prom dress anyhow.
4. reception! now you can really have some fun. for your first dance as husband and wife, pick out a good long celine dion single, get a guy to work a fog machine, and get another guy to work a fan machine thing that blows silver confetti across the dance floor.*
oh wait. i was writing advice for if you want to have a wedding like my aunt did this summer. wrong thread, my bad.
but while i’m at it, don’t forget a really weird, hammy public display of “new husband diving under my skirts to fish out the garter, ahyuck” or the 40 year old bachelor cousin of the groom who hits on the bride’s teenage nieces. oh yeah.
*you think i’m making this part up, don’t you.
Mazel tov to you both, Lauren, and thanks for the donation to an org that advocates for queer marriage. I left a longish post on Pandagon re: what my wife and I decided to do. Recommendation #1: Make it the kind of event that you and Chef want to attend.
Mnemosyne’s order of things you should spend on seems about right, although we placed food above all else. The flowers got a little bit away from us, but they were pretty in the end, so I didn’t care that much (But who really remembers flowers? No one.).
I also agree with the people saying to plan it like it’s just another big party. Our ceremony was 8 minutes long (everyone said that this helped make the ceremony awesome), and all the rest of the time was tasty food and good wine and champagne. Mmm.
Also, there were polkas. And we rocked them.
Instead of the standard wedding flowers (which, good ghod ya’ll! cost a fortune) we went with having fresh orchid leis flown in from Hawaii. Then we started the ceremony with walking ourselves in and presenting leis to our families before meeting at the front of the ‘hall’ to exchange leis and a kiss. Pretty, memorable and still cost less than the more usual flowers.
Reception food should be yummy, easy to eat without destroying one’s wardrobe and solid enough to soak up booze. Please, there should be chairs, because eating standing up is a pain. For extra blackmail purposes, scatter some of those disposable cameras on the tables with a card inviting guests to shoot the fun and leave the cameras in a box by the door. They won’t replace a pro taking *your* pictures but the candid shots can be fun, in an “Uncle Charley did WHAT?” kind of way.
Sounds to me like you need a wedding wrangler. Do you have a friend who throws kickass parties?
Lots of good advice here. Even a funky wedding involves lots of planning, and that is stressful, so go easy on yourself. If you’re already doing non-traditional, then you have more chances for fun. But remember; everyone’s really there because they love ya’ll, and for the booze. And maybe the cake. Everything else is optional.
And honestly, watching your grandma do the Chicken Dance can be awesome….
Is there any reason why you have to have a big, impersonal shindig?
If it’s about your parents, how about letting them host a nice brunch for their friends, then when you get back from your honeymoon, have a party at YOUR place, catered by someone fabulous, for your friends?
In my experience, the success of the marriage is inversely proportional to the amount spent on the wedding.
Get yourself a nice off-the-rack dress, keep it simple, and no music. Everyone hates wedding music anyway.
Trust me, in five years you won’t ever look at your wedding photos again anyway.
We would have been killed if we eloped also, so we rented a rehabbed old barn in a sustainable living community that could hold 100 guests. I wanted a dress, but I didn’t want the hefty price tag - I got my dress for
I find this really awesome.
We got married by a judge in my parents’ living room, then had a lunch reception at a local hotel’s banquet room. No music during the reception, or the ceremony (although I meant there to be Pachelbel’s Canon playing on a tape or something during my entrance, but I forgot to arrange it).
I think we had wine with lunch, and my dad did a toast that I don’t remember at all, but the whole thing was pretty low-key. I’m an introvert, as is my husband, and I *hate* being the center of attention. The day after, I woke up with 5 concurrent fever blisters because of the stress of planning the wedding (in less than 6 weeks).
We also got married at the end of January, which is decidedly not wedding season. So the hotel was willing to be reasonable on room rental - that, and having it a lunch reception, made it almost as cheap as doing it on a Friday, iirc. It was 14 years ago, so the details are a little fuzzy.
I agree with everyone else that you should focus only on those details that you care most about, and don’t worry about the rest of it. I stressed over details I didn’t care about (but my mother did), the stuff I cared passionately about got messed up, and if I had to do it all over again, I’d do it very differently. Oh well, that’s what hindsight is for.
For our reception, we skipped flowers for cobalt blue votive holders with white votive candles on white “tablecloths” (actually sheets — we washed them and gave them to the battered women’s shelter afterwards, and the candles certainly helped during the Enron-prompted rolling blackouts).
We made our own mix tapes and rented a good sound system.
Because we knew that lots of our guests were good with the picture-taking, we put the reusable cameras on each table (only a few of them walked away) and asked our friends who brought their real cameras if they could give us copies of their good shots.
The toasts came from whoever felt like making one. There was also a blank-book where people wrote or drew what they felt like sharing with us.
We catered the shin-dig ourself and had *way* too much food. We were able to return the unopened bottles of wine and bubbly to the liquor store afterwards.
The less elaborate and scripted/scheduled things are, the more time you’ll have to actually spend time with your guests — which is definitely more fun than being in the spotlight.
I agree with everyone: this is a party about the two of you, and as such, it’s about what you like, can afford, and will be fun or meaningful or both. Although toasting is fun, I wouldn’t even expect that: I’ve been to a reception at a fair, and one as part of a show where we all rehearsed our acts beforehand and took turns performing, and I’ve been to BYOB weddings, and I’ve been to cash bar weddings, and I’ve been to catered weddings.
At my wedding, we provided wine and venue and cake and coffee/tea/juice/pop, but the food was potluck. People brought instruments, and we had spontaneous live music. It was great.
I think my only request stemming from being an attendee at many wedding or commitment celebrations alternative & traditional: I have no problem chipping in for the wedding if I only have to pay my own way for any stag/ettes &/or there isn’t a shower. But if there’s shower, stag, stagette, wedding contribution (potluck or booze or whatever), and wedding present, then I’m stretched. I don’t have that kind of budget., although I wish I did. Also, being in a wedding party can be expensive - with clothing, transportation, hair/nails as requested, and/or any fun wedding party activity that gets planned. So limit your financial requests, but go nuts on the other support requests: people love to chip in to celebrate those they love.
Yeah, I like the camera thing, too.
AND–the “big-honking-deal clergyman” would make time for THIS wedding without any problems.
I LOVE these wedding comments.
I’m afraid with our bunch, if we had it in a former psychiatric facility, they would open it up again and commit most of the bride’s family.
I really like the potluck thing and the people bringing their instruments and playing. Ethan wants to learn “Here Comes the Bride” on his harmonica and another grandson plays the guitar and one daughter plays the piano and the middle daughter plays the French horn and I could yodel and the bride and groom both are musical and–hey–this sounds like a winner!! Bring on the band and the booze and let the wedding begin!!!!!!!!!!!!
Of course, I eloped and had no one but the minister, my husband and I at our wedding. I wonder if we are legally married since there were no “witnesses”. Oh, well, too late. That was all 43 years ago.
Food, booze, photography sounds like a great priority list to me! We love our photos more than anything else, and a video really isn’t necessary. I recommend getting a great caterer, great bartender (picking a signature drink for the evening is fun and can reduce costs), and trustworthy photographer.
I know some people who have thrown potluck receptions with good results, if you’re really going for a down home feel. But the gifts won’t be as good. :)
Oh, and last piece of advice - have a friend be your assistant for the day and ask her/him to just keep making eye contact with you periodically. That way when you need a drink during photos or an excuse to leave Drunk Uncle Marty for a bit, you always have one.
The best wedding I ever went to had the guests bringing a dish to pass for the reception, and something to decorate alters with at the church (it was a pagan wedding in a methodist church). Decorating started at noon with a wedding at 4 and dinner at 6. Everyone was asked to bring something sacred, and the grooms bought some art supplies and eeryone rolled up their sleeves and painted some murels, wove a wreath out of straw and yarn, and arranged candles and fabric over the tables.
Lauren, our wedding was fairly simple and fairly inexpensive. Depending on what you want, here are some of my ideas/money savers… Any accesory can be bought off ebay and fairly inexpensively (this is where I got my garter, cake topper, flower girl basket (unneccesary if not doing a full blown ceremony), veil, gifts for my attendants (cute little frames for like 3 bucks each)). We did the do it yourself invitations and to save on money, instead of SASEs, I included a phone number for RSVP’s. I got a wedding dress at a discount bridal shop for 140, I just watched for end of season sales. In fact, if you wear even close to the size I did at the time, you are welcome to it, it’s silk and beaded and I loved it. This is another good use for ebay, cheap dresses worn once. For table decorations we went to the dollar store and got potpourri burners for 1.00 each, potpourri for 1.00 and a couple dozen candles from the dollar store in our “wedding colors”. It was probably 25 dollars? Then we rented a helium tank and a bought a couple dozen balloons to finish the effect. We found an inexpensive local caterer, but if you don’t have a huge family like me, you can probably get away with doing the food yourself. Call around to different DJ’s, you’ll find a fairly wide variety of price ranges; we got ours for 75 dollars an hour. For drinks we did two liters of soda, a keg of beer, a couple bowls of spiked punch, a couple bowls of non-spiked punch and some cheap two dollar wine. If I think of anything else I will come back and let you know!
Trust me, in five years you won’t ever look at your wedding photos again anyway.
Eh, YMMV. It’s been more than that for us, and we still take a peek every once in a while. And I have our engagement photo up in my office. But good wedding stills isn’t a huge deal.
My sister’s was in the back yard under a tent. Trailer full of booze, good food, and the place was cheap. The ceremony was in front of the garden, and three people read stuff — I read a heavily abridged Burns poem. The groomsmen wore khaki slacks and blazers; the whole thing was semi-formal. Real fun, cheap, and no stressing about the headcount.
Friends just got married in the backyard of the family home, with a great ocean view behind them. Same thing: catered food, ceremony in the open, semiformal attire, good booze and music.
Having seen it done well several times, I’m a fan. If my wife and I ever renew our vows, I expect that’s how we’ll do it.
I had to do it in a Catholic church to satisfy my wife and hers. We did, however, specify no readings from anything by Paul — a guy who thinks of romantic love as second-best to start with has no place at a wedding. Also, no playing of that fucking dirge from Lohengrin. (The marriage was a disaster, and the song is Wagner’s closest prologue to the Star Wars theme.) Besides, Wagner was an antisemite. My wife walked to Highland Cathedral, a modern pipe tune.
We had a small reception (tapas platter, champagne, and cupcakes) immediately post ceremony. And then bought some giant lasagnes , salad, and bread. And a whole bunch of booze. For a causal party in the evening at our place we danced to the stereo, wore jeans and had a blast.
The last wedding I went to had a puppet show of the story of how the couple had met. It was fucking hilarious - and sweet at the same time. Plus - it was relevent since the bride was in fact a puppet maker, and had made the puppet used in the show as the cake toppers.
I’m not sure this would translate to anyone else.
Since you’re both foodies, I’d go with the suggestion that the party/reception be at a restaurant. Like your favorite, or the one you went out to the most while dating, or something like that. In fact, the more I think about it, that’s where I would spend my money if I were you. We spent most of our non-existent funds flying some of my friends from college to NC to play for the wedding.
I’m the wrong one to be giving advice about weddings. We had a very simple ceremony at my parents’ apartment, and a party at my father-in-law’s afterwards. We didn’t spend a whole lot because neither the now-husband nor I had any money to spend. I made my dress, his stepmother and her sister made all the food for the reception, and my husband and I took turns being DJ and guests of honor. That would be 18 years ago, as of next month. So things turned out okay. Having said all that, I would have killed to just elope.
Do whatever makes you both happy, and it’ll be great.
Um, I recommend getting Judge Busch to do a simple civil ceremony. Ain’t know reason you can’t a quick “I do” in the same place as the reception. My wedding was like that and it worked pretty well. Only prob was, my mom made all this special vegan food for my wedding and I got none of it because a receiving line that I did not want formed spontaneously. So what out for that. If you’re having buffet stlye food make sure someone is making sure you get some before everyone else eats it all.
Also, I’ve been to a couple weddings where the music was run off a laptop or iPod. So, like someone else mantioned, consider a carefully crafted playlist. You are welcome to borrow any of my 21 straight hours of 80s music or my 3 hours of danceable hip-hop. Rob Base ring a bell?
And, as far as I know, I’m still booked for pictures, right?
I got married– and had the reception– on the cruise ship we were using for our honeymoon, the morning before the ship set sail. Significantly cheaper and less stressful than an in-town (Chicago) wedding, and it pared the wedding guest list down to the people who REALLY wanted to come. At the end of the reception, we didn’t have to get in a car and drive to an airport; we just stayed on the boat and everyone else left. BLISS.
Bonus: since the ship employees do flower arrangements and cook bad-assed food all the time, everything was perfect. I had no idea what anything would look like until we got there, and it worked great. All I had to do was show up and get dressed, and the wedding coordinator did everything else. It was awesome. Highly recommended.
Oh– and the photography was cheap, comprehensive, REALLY well done, and we had the prints and a CD-ROM of every single shot in hand by the time the cruise ended.
For our wedding I had just over 100 relatives who would be really pissed if we eloped and denied them a good party. So we ended up having to figure out a way to have a relatively cheap wedding for 200. It sounds like yours will be smaller, but hopefully some of this will apply.
First, like I said before, pick your 2-3 priorities and compromise everything else.
You should delegate to your sibling(s), friends, mother(s); hell give everyone invited a job. We had help with everything from food (catered by a friend of my father-in-law), the wedding site (at another friend’s farm), DJ (2 friend’s iPODs & another’s PA), setting up and taking down tables & chairs (many friends & relatives). ect, ect.
Secondly, what other’s said about buying your own booze and hiring your own bartenders and/or servers. Those f****** made out like bandits because my father and my father-in-law both became big shots and had to tip all the help without telling us or each other until the next day.
For the ceremony itself, my wife’s step-mom was the officient. She has one of those $15 certificates so she can marry people. Since we’re athiests, instead of biblical readings, we each had 1 friend and 1 family member come up and say a few words. Two read poems first, then spoke. The other two just prepared remarks. We wrote our own vows. The whole thing lasted about 20 minutes.
Well, my wife and I got married just over a year ago. We managed a reception with about 250 people for around $2000. Here’s what we did:
We had a lot of help preparing from family and friends. There was no one hired to help. Maybe we have exceptional friends, but everyone seemed to enjoy it–and it made it more family-feeling than if the help was hired.
We had turkey salad, curried lentils, good bread, and fruit.
We bought 8 turkeys on sale, poached them (in my 6×10 kitchen) and stored them in friends’ refrigerators. The day before the wedding we chopped the meat up with celery and a little onion, and put salt, pepper, and mayonaisse on it.
We cooked about 10 pounds of lentils, and spiced them up nicely (this made sure there was a main dish for the vegans). That was insamnely cheap–if I wanted to save money, I’d have more lentils and less chicken salad.
We got about 50 pounds of fruit–oranges and grapes, since that’s what was on sale.
We used CostCo heavy paper tablecloths, plastic cutlery and heavy paper plates. We served everything in the aluminum baking pans like you get at the grocery store to cook a turkey in if you don’t have a roaster.
Now–as church-goers, we didn’t pay much for space. And since there were a lot of people coming with significant alcohol problems, we didn’t have alcohol.
If you have bridesmaids, consider doing what we did and picking a color (or two), and let them pick a flattering style. That avoids the problem of spending a lot of money on a dress you’ll wear once.