Lately I've been mired in wedding planning. Okay, it's not really that bad, and it makes me appreciate my fiancee's economical sense of decor and style. But one aspect of the planning that's been really hard for me is the question of how to design a ceremony that reflects our values.
It's great that someone is willing to sell flipclips as wedding favors at $8.99 each. (Actually as cheap as $5.99 for orders of 200+.) But cost aside, what does a flipclip add to the event? Is it decoration? Is it symbolic? Is it commemorative?
But it's been hard for me to step back from the "Wow, it's really cool that for only $0.4391736/person, we can rent a reflective doodad that also doubles as a whats-it-called." sentiment to a more comprehensive picture that encompasses questions like "What would I like our ceremony to communicate?" or "What themes would I like represented at our marriage?" or "Do I really care if we have a concrete cast of our footprints?"
Maybe that's why I've felt so frustrated by the commercialness of weddings: Everyone is very happy to sell something for the wedding, but it's hard to put a context to the detail. [Incidentally, often they don't sell it very well - I've been aghast at how many businesses need to spend $500 to buy a decent website. I understand that pricing information changes, but couldn't you at least ballpark your typical services and costs? I know that an all-text site is so 1998, but couldn't you include a few photographs of the wedding urn you want me to rent from you?]
It's like trying to write an essay. Every essay needs an organizational structure - a thesis, introduction, paragraphs with topic sentences and a conclusion. Yes, details and supporting arguments are important, but an essay isn't comprised by throwing details together. The wedding shopping process feels a lot like trying to wade through the details without a supporting structure.
And yes, developing a structure is hard without knowing the cost of various details. In advanced engineering theory, this problem is known as "Catch-22".
So far the best solution I've found so far is an iterative one:
- Fiancee and I outline budget.
- Fiancee and I brainstorm wedding ideas and sketch out a corresponding day. (This step keeps highlighting details like 'hrm, it might be X hours between breakfast and the reception, we'd better budget brunch for the wedding party.')
- Fiancee and I research approximate pricing (and use the research to brainstorm more ideas).
- Review the research. Discard unreasonable ideas ("What? The reindeer drawn sled requires snow and we're not getting married in the midwinter...")
- Select affordable ideas that we like. Repeat 1-5 for remaining plans.
4 comments:
Schedule the difficult / expensive things first, leaving you free to shift the little things around more as needed. We made Tuesday night wedding planning night and used TheKnot.com's checklist to stay on top of everything.
You'd think it would be so much easier, now, with the internet. But it's not. I know when we were trying to plan ours from down here, it was darn near impossible to get a quote/estimate from vendors just because many of them can only FAX or MAIL it, because they have to use some special software or something.
Our values were reflected in the site, the looseness of the ceremony and dress, and in the post wedding camp out. It was kind of hard to be complete because Gustavo's friends were not there, and all the Brasilians wanted to sit at one table together and talk in Portuguese, and only dance to samba. It was pretty much either one side or the other. I assume you will not have this problem.
I suggest not having a budget! ;-)
1. Write a misson statement for your marriage.
2. Work on the ceremony first and regularly revise it as you think more deeply about it towards the wedding with that statemtn in mind.
3. Each choose three parts that are important to you (ie color, dress, attendant gifts, specific flowers) & make sure those exist in satisfying ways.
4. Base everything else on hospitality towards your guests (service times, programs or not, favors or donation to charity, bar)
5. Pick crap. Don't repick it a week later.
6. Let go of all the "extra" stuff that isn't on the list of six things, decide it doesn't really matter eternally and just put something in place. You won't remember it in a year.
7. Choose one day a week to talk NOTHING wedding related& just cuddle down and enjoy being engaged.
8. Do what you want. Buck tradition, appropriate tradition, flex tradition, but make it yours. Say what you really want to say to each other as you pledge yourselves before God, and let it express who you are.
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