Real Life Wedding Planning: Part 1
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011I was not one of those little girls who played out her dream wedding with dolls or who knew what kind of dress she wanted since the age of 5. I never really thought about my wedding until I got engaged on December 23, 2008. Then, it hit me: I was going to have a wedding and I was going to have to plan it. Of course, I didn’t start planning it until 8 months ago because I wanted to enjoy being engaged for awhile first.
Planning things is a gift of mine, so I didn’t think it was going to be too difficult. I immediately started making lists and felt that these would keep me in check. They did not. I did not realize that wedding planning takes more than lists and that it encompasses using a vast amount of social etiquette.
This first thing that we decided was the date. Since my fiancé and I met on December 23, 2006, and he proposed 2 years later exactly, we went with December 23, 2011. A date that would eventually cause a number of dramatic issues. We chose this date because it was and is important to us. It will mark our 5 year anniversary together since the cold, snowy, December evening that we met. Simple enough, with a touch of romance and sentiment.
The second thing we discussed was the location. I am a Maritimer, born and raised in a small community in Nova Scotia where most of my family still lives. My fiancé, on the other hand, has lived in Alberta all his life. Now came the question of which family was going to have to fly across the country right before Christmas. Since I am rather frugal, and because I did not want a large wedding, we decided to have the wedding in Alberta to save ourselves the cost of flying and having to put our three pets in a kennel for a week. Besides, after looking into what it would take for me to plan a wedding in Nova Scotia while living in Alberta, I decided that I am rather fond of my sanity.
Then came telling everyone. With such a small wedding, we didn’t do invitations, we just sort of called them and casually mentioned that they were invited to our wedding that was a few months away.
That was an adventure on its own. Not only was I asking my family to fly here, I was asking them to do it just before Christmas. The response to that idea was, “Why so close to Christmas?”, “Won’t it be too cold?”, “Can’t you change the date?”. The date and location have caused a sort of snowball effect in our wedding planning, as you can imagine. But, we stuck to what was important to us. We have made some changes to our initial idea in order to accommodate our guests, but only to a certain extent.
Some people choose their date based on the availability of the venue, some people choose it based on a statutory holiday, some people simply pick a date at random. You have to decide what is important to you and your fiancé and work from there. If the venue is more important than the date you get married on, get it when you can. If you want your guests from out of town to have more travel time, plan it around a holiday. Whatever your reasoning behind the date, make sure that it is your own. You are allowed to be at least a bit selfish when it comes to your wedding, so use that while you can.
