Several years ago, when my husband and I were engaged, I remember having several conversations that began with me discussing planning my own wedding and getting tripped up on the details. I wanted to plan something small, something intimate and certainly nothing that would resemble public spectacle.
Frighteningly enough, there are lists that you need to consider that take two to three pages to cover and I will be listing a lot of those throughout this month in our Going to the Chapel month. In the meanwhile, when it comes to planning a wedding you have a few options:
- You can hire a professional wedding planner.
- Your Mother can provide a lot of help.
- Your future mother-in-law may provide a lot of insight.
- You can get help from a friend, particularly a future maid or matron of honor
- You can do it yourself.
These are just ideas. Traditionally, when a couple married in the last couple of hundred years – the bride’s family paid for the ceremony with the groom’s family chipping in for the reception. There’s a lot of etiquette that goes into planning the wedding from coordinating the colors of the bride’s mother with the groom’s mother to where people sit in venue they are choosing to be married in.
Weddings have variations, obviously, when it involves different religions. A Catholic wedding ceremony and a Islamic wedding ceremony may both result in marriage, but they will have differences in the rituals that surround the ceremony. Modern marriages can take place in multiple venues and more and more, we are seeing unique wedding ideas that are stepping out of the chapel.
You have weddings that take place:
- On Horseback
- When the couple is jumping out of a plane
- In family backyards
- In arboretums
- In venues like Disney World
- And many, many more …
We can talk about traditional versus modern. We can talk about the golden days of yesteryear when everything was simpler – but the fact is – weddings have never been simple. They were always complicated events designed to celebrate the union between two individuals and two families. We’ll do our best to honor this during our Going to the Chapel month.
So whether you are doing the wedding planning personally or helping someone else, post your questions, your ideas and your thoughts. If I don’t know the answers, I will do my best to find out. We’ll also be talking to a couple of professional wedding planners here and providing their insights over the next month.