Dealing with Wedding Nightmares

September 17, 2014 By Jenna

It’s the middle of the night and you wake up in a cold sweat.

The wedding disaster nightmares have started…

Stress nightmares about embarrassing disasters related to your wedding are common. You want everything to be perfect. The nightmares can start when you say, “Yes,” to your fiance and accept an engagement ring.

One very common nightmare that plagues new brides-to-be is losing or damaging the engagement ring. In order to ease your mind when this nightmare is keeping you awake at night, try some preliminary safety techniques.

Buy a strong chain and wear your ring around your neck when you are doing something that makes you worry about losing it. Those fears can surface when you are doing dishes while wearing it: “What if it washes down the drain with the rinse water?” How about seeing it fall off your finger while you are using the garbage disposal.

Any activities you normally do every day can trigger stress dreams, like walking on the beach or gardening or exercising at the gym. Placing your ring on the chain and wearing it around your neck will ease some of your concerns. Consider buying replacement insurance as a jewelry rider on your homeowner’s policy. Take clear pictures of your ring and keep them where you can find them again. Those photos will make replacing or replicating it easier.

One nightmare that might be ruining your sleep is the weather on your wedding day. Since you have to book chapels months ahead of your wedding date, you can check extended weather forecasts that are actually only elegant guesses. If you were planning an outdoor wedding, you might want to rent a tent and set it up to protect you and your guests during the ceremony.

If you are marrying in a park or other outdoor facility, check into the possibility of using some nearby indoor space if a storm is approaching. If it is not raining, but very hot instead, the shade from the tent might be welcome.

Weather can be a major stress factor for your honeymoon planning. If you are going to a tropical location, weather can be volatile at anytime. Tropical storms can blow in without much advance warning, particularly if you booked the accommodations months before your wedding. Some tropical weather hazards are seasonal, like hurricanes, and your tropical honeymoon can be booked to avoid that possible weather disaster.

Your honeymoon doesn’t have to be in a tropical location to be at the mercy of the weather. If you were dreaming of long, intimate walks on a beach or private picnics in a park, rain, gloomy overcast days or heavy winds can keep you inside the hotel for several days. When booking a resort, make sure there are some interesting indoor activities, either on the site or close by, to replace your outdoor plans. Be flexible and your honeymoon won’t be ruined by things you cannot control.

Receptions can provide their own nightmares for the bride-to-be. Nervous and stressed brides have several nightmares in common. One popular one is that the your booked entertainment doesn’t show up and your reception is left without background music for the party or a way to complete the traditional dances with the bride. While this scenario might be a real possibility and not totally just a stress vision, you can take some simple precautions.

Disc jockeys and other entertainment groups have been known to not show up or to be less than you thought they were when you booked them. A simple solution is to have a backup portable stereo, with speakers, and appropriate CDs in waiting. Most reception facilities have closets or cupboards where the stereo can be stashed ahead of time if it is needed. Better safe than sorry.

The food at your reception can also be a high-level stress point for the bride. Even if you hire a catering service, make sure the food that needs to be kept cool until it is needed, like your wedding cake, ice cream desserts or bowls of salad, is kept in the refrigerator and served or put on the buffet table when the meal is underway. Some catering services have set up buffet tables early with all the dishes out, leaving ice cream melting into a puddle in their dishes.

Planning ahead can make your wedding day the event you’ve been dreaming about for years. A little creative forethought can head off all those little problems that can creep up unexpectedly, like headaches, upset stomachs, accidental cuts and bruises or a sudden allergy attack for a member of your bridal party who didn’t tell you she was allergic to flowers.

A gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with a small assortment of aspirin, Tylenol, Band-Aids, antiseptic wipes, generic allergy pills, Rolaids and a small emergency sewing kit, can save the day if needed. You might want to add a small can of anti-static spray in that Ziploc bag. All those beautiful, shiny bridesmaid’s gowns, including your wedding gown, can become clingy.

Just think ahead and anticipate anything that can disrupt the smooth operation of your wedding and make the necessary accommodations to take care of whatever you fear might happen.

Beautiful Weddings on a Budget

September 17, 2014 By Jenna

With all the preparations and costs of large elaborate weddings, it is often difficult to remember that your purpose is to join your lives together with each other. Your celebration of that joining does not have to be elaborate or tedious.

While you are basking in the love and attention of your family and guests, those guests are hungry, tired and ready to relax before heading home. They want to eat something, get a piece of cake and socialize until they leave for home.

Knowing this, you can make everyone happy with a morning wedding, followed by a lavish breakfast buffet. Guests can socialize while sipping mimosas or cups of coffee and sampling the buffet. Everyone, including the wedding party, gets to relax and take their time in a relaxed atmosphere. The guests can leave for home when they want to leave and the wedding couple can leave on their honeymoon in a less frantic manner.

Elaborate and expensive weddings are fine if money isn’t a problem, but in today’s economy, inexpensive and less formal celebrations might be easier on your parent’s budgets. An unspoken wedding disaster is the drain on your parent’s bank account when they try to send you off with the elegant ceremony and celebration you’ve been dreaming about since you were a teenager.

The food at receptions is a major hit on anyone’s budget. Fancy sit-down dinners can cost more than $100 a person, some twice that or more. Cases of good champagne and the expense of a catering company will break most budgets.

This homespun solution can be just as elegant and tasty as most catered meals or buffets and a lot more personal. Buffets fill the bill and are easier to do than a sit-down meal. Several of the good cooks in both families, including friends of either the bride or groom, can be enlisted to make their favorite or “signature” dishes for a buffet table. Fill in with bowls of olives, artichoke hearts and other condiments.

Linens, serving dishes, utensils and other presentation needs can be rented. Placing something simple under the tablecloth, like books, aluminum cake pans or bowls turned upside down, will give you a presentation at different levels which is both pleasing and makes scooping selections out of bowls and onto plates easier.

If you’re on a budget, then a cash bar will defray reception costs considerably and maybe reduce over-indulging. But, if that’s not what you want, consider a champagne fountain on a separate covered table with glasses stacked next to the fountain. Colored lights shining on the fountain will give it a sparkling, festive look and guests can serve themselves, avoiding the expense of having servers with bottles of champagne filling glasses as they move around the room.

Keeping Your Wedding Guests Happy

September 17, 2014 By Jenna

In the glow of your wedding, you and your wedding party might plan on just enjoying your reception, assuming that all your guests will, too. Grumpy guests can make your reception something you will want to forget instead of enjoying every moment.

Actually, your guests can start getting restless during your wedding ceremony. Unless there is some major reason for an extended wedding, with long rituals and complicated vows, do not put your guests through a long, boring service.

If children are present, a long service will cause some to start whining, others will need to go to the bathroom and some more will start complaining loudly that they are hungry. A couple of restless children can ruin a wedding ceremony in a few minutes.

Your guests are part of your wedding from the service to the end of the reception. You invited them and they came to share your special day with you and your fiancé. Their comfort and happiness has to be a part of your planning or you will have dissatisfied guests who will remember that and remind you of it forever. You might consider that a disaster.

To start with, consider the timing for your wedding.

If you are having a late-morning wedding, your out-of town guests will be tired, if they drove a long way that morning and had to deal with traffic. Breakfast for most of them might very well have been something quick while they got dressed up and ready for your wedding. They will be hungry soon.

A long wait after your wedding while the photographer takes official photos is an unnecessary delay that can be shortened if your bridal party shows up early, before the service, and poses for the pictures for your album. Nothing much happens at the reception until the bride and groom arrive and making your guests wait a couple of hours for the bridal party to arrive is rude and thoughtless.

There’s several options you can use to avoid the usual delay your guests endure between arriving at the church and the meal or buffet at your reception.

You can invite close family and friends to the wedding ceremony and invite the rest of your guest list to the reception for the food, toasts and dancing. If you chose this solution, provide a specific time for the reception and make sure your wedding party is there when your guests start arriving. The “meet and greet” part of the reception can do double duty as appetizers are circulated by the catering staff.

Allowing an hour for the receiving line, if you have one, and the chance for your guests to mingle while sampling the appetizers and a cold drink will do a lot for your hospitality. Serve your meal or open the buffet table about an hour after you arrive at the reception.

If your wedding is a mid-morning service, serve brunch at the reception. If you are marrying in the late-afternoon, use the same time frame…wedding at 3 or 4 pm, light appetizers an hour later, say 5 pm, and your meal or buffet at 6 pm. Most of your guests will have eaten lunch around noon, before arriving at the wedding, and will be hungry.

A wedding in the evening will delay the meal until 9 or 10 pm and most of your guests will feel like they are starving and you will be exhausted. One solution is to move your ceremony back an hour or so, like 6 pm. If you do that, your guests can be munching appetizers by 7 or 7:30 pm and sitting down to a meal or attacking the buffet table shortly thereafter.

Hungry and tired guests are not happy guests!

After the meal, try to keep the traditional toasts and stories about the two of you to a minimum. Don’t let anyone ramble on and on, as some might be prone to do, particularly if they haven’t eaten yet and stopped the hunger pangs with trips to the cash bar.

After your wedding and the traditional events that normally follow the meal, your guests want some cake and will start thinking about the trip home. It is your task, as the bride, to keep the reception events moving along. Don’t rush through your plans, but keep an orderly progression flowing from one event to another.

By the way, there is no requirement to smash cake in each other’s face at the cutting ceremony.

Older guests and those with children will be anxious to leave your reception and get started on the trip home. Most will do that after the cake cutting.

If you think about your guests and their needs during your wedding and reception, you will ensure a good time for all.

How to Deal With Wedding Crashers

September 17, 2014 By Jenna

We’ve all seen the movie Wedding Crashers with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson.

They celebrate ‘wedding season’ like we celebrate birthdays – always ready to join the party. While the story worked out in the end for the two troublemakers by falling in love, it also wrecked havoc on a few other celebrations. Learn how to deal with wedding crashers and tips to deter them in the first place.

When you get engaged and announce your happy news to family, friends and everyone, even those you didn’t send an announcement to, will expect to attend the ceremony and reception. At either, or both functions, you might find several people you didn’t invite or don’t even know, for that matter.

You might be thinking that only those who get the personal announcement of your engagement or the engraved invitation to your wedding and reception will be the only ones who even know about it, or where it is.

Many families with a newly engaged child publish the announcement in a local newspaper. The engaged couples commonly start a wedding blog or publish the announcement and pictures on social sites like FaceBook or MySpace. Uninvited old friends and far away relatives will get word of the festivities and assume that they are invited to the wedding because the announcement was made public. Stating that the guest list is by invitation only will not change that assumption.

The only thing you can really do when you are faced with wedding crashers from your distant past, like old neighbors or people you used to work with, is to be gracious. If you know that uninvited guests might show up at your wedding and reception, plan for it and budget for a few extra guests at your reception. Include some extra wedding favors for the new place settings.

Your old acquaintances are probably not intending to be a burden or to do some malicious act that would embarrass you. More than likely, they just wanted to be a part of your ceremony and festivities. Perhaps they believed that your past connection with them was more important to you than it was.

Have your bridesmaids and groomsmen notify the catering company to set a few more places at the table while you are having your wedding photos taken at the church. Make sure the extra favors are also placed with the new table settings.

There might be some with malicious intentions from those who show up uninvited to your ceremony or reception. Your fiance’s old girlfriends or rejected suitors of your own from your past, for example. Maybe an employee from a place one of you used to work has a grudge to settle and decides to disrupt your wedding.

If this happens, notify your best man and the rest of the groomsmen and

have them ask the intruder politely to leave. If he or she refuses, quietly call the police and let them handle it.

Sometimes, people who have no connection to anyone in the wedding party will show up at the reception to get some free food. That’s all they want, except maybe to scoop up some of the wedding favors before they “eat and run.” If you’re having an expensive sit-down dinner, their intrusion can cost you several hundred dollars. Some wedding crashers are burglars and have an eye on your wedding gifts. If no one knows them, have the best man or the maid of honor ask them to leave.

While you may feel responsible to send the intruders out the door, since it’s your wedding, it would be better to have the best man or one of the groomsmen do the asking for you. You, the hostess and bride at the reception, have no responsibility to be gracious or even polite. Don’t spend any time agonizing about it. Just make the decision and ask the appropriate person to handle it.

One way to head all this off before it even starts is to require an authentic invitation that has to be presented at the door of the reception and the wedding, too, if necessary. When you publish your announcement, be sure to include the invitation requirement for entrance.

Some have a list of all those who have been invited and all those who have specifically not been invited. An attendant can verify identity for those who forgot their invitation or lost it. This precaution is becoming more and more popular as more and more people start acting crazy and invading private parties to cause a stir or promote a cause.

Your wedding is yours to enjoy and there is no reason to tolerate wedding crashers, whatever their reason for being an uninvited intruder.