Hokay. So. Here is the wedding. Chillin. Damn that is a sweet wedding you might say.
If you don’t get that reference, my soul weeps for you.
One standard wedding for 70 people in a big lovely barn, please. The joining of two families and all that.
One tiny family, where most of the relatives live in South Africa who can’t make it.
And one large family where half the people don’t speak to the other half and are refusing to come.
Soo a ginormous venue for 40 people, then.
Doesn’t really add up, does it?
So! Instead of a great big venue two hours away from us that we’ll never fill, we’ve now booked a set of rooms in a lovely little hotel 10 minutes down the road from us.
And we honestly couldn’t be happier, for a number of reasons:
All that dolla dolla
The “new” wedding is costing us thousands of pounds less. The whole process with the original venue made us realise just how cynical the wedding industry is and we really couldn’t care less for it.
So no more bull about our magical fairytale day from venues and suppliers who make us feel like cattle on a production line.
Our new venue is actually flexible, cares about what we want to do for our day and gives us individual attention as a couple.
Less hanging about
Because everything is so much more reasonable now we’ve been able to bring the date forward by 11 months, so we’ll be getting married in September this year.
I was getting really twitchy not being able to plan anything because it was so far away.
The whole point of us getting married is because we want to spend the rest of our lives together but having to sit around waiting for that just because of money was getting really disheartening.
More intimate
We’ve slashed the guest list from 70 to less than 20. Of course it’s nothing personal against the 50 or so people who we won’t be inviting, it’s just a necessity from the new venue and budget point of view.
We considered the classic “If we were taking a group of people out for a meal, who would we pay £150 a head for?”, but more than that it just came down to who we make a mutual effort to see on a regular basis.
Our wedding breakfast will see us all sitting around a single banquet-style table; not only will we be able to give everyone the attention they deserve (are you telling me you like going to weddings where you get plonked on the table in the corner with the second cousins?), it’s going to be so much easier not mucking around with table plans making sure the right family members are separated.
Less environmental impact
I was starting to feel really uncomfortable about where our wedding was sitting in relation to my feelings about trying to live in a more eco-friendly way.
But now most of the guests coming live locally so there will be fewer long journeys being made, hotel stays, new outfits being bought never to be worn again, meat and other food being consumed and wasted; the entire thing is just lower impact and I like that a lot.
We also don’t need to kill a ton of flowers to tart the place up, which is something I’ve always hated about weddings. We’re just going to have one long, low arrangement on our ceremony table then move it to the dinner table, and maybe a bouquet.
We’ve also opted for a wedding website instead of killing ALL THE TREES for paper invitations, and we made everyone individual login details and texted them out. It might not be particularly fancy, but hey, the website looks kickass.
99% of the people we’ve told about the new plan have been really supportive about it:
It’s so much more “you guys”
If we could go back we wouldn’t invite half the people we did
Spending a deposit on a house isn’t what getting married is about
It may be completely different to how you had/want your big day and it may go against all the traditions you hold dear, and that’s okay; we’re incredibly happy with our rather ruthless, but necessary, decision.
Plus, it’s less than 8 months to go now; that sounds a lot better than 19!
