One way to customize your wedding is with unusual details.
“It’s exciting to see individual traditions emerge as two families blend into one,” says Modern Bride magazine.
Why not integrate ethnic and regional customs into your ceremony, perhaps with special music, foods, color schemes and floral arrangements?
Or arrange for unusual transportation, both for the bridal couple as well as members of the wedding party. Options include horse-drawn carriages, stretch limos, and classic or antique automobiles.
Look through family archives, such as old trunks and photograph albums, for ideas as well as objects you can incorporate into your ceremony. One bride had the lace from her fiancé’s grandmother’s wedding gown sewn into her custom-made dress; another couple’s jazz-age celebration was inspired by photographs of her grandparents’ 1920s wedding.
Go ahead and incorporate non-traditional ideas into your celebration. If you and your fiancé fell in love at a Fourth of July picnic, you might consider celebrating your love with an afternoon of square dancing, a dinner of chili and roast beef, even fireworks to add a spectacular ending to your special day.
Have a surprising send off. Pass out helium-filled balloons for your guests to release after the wedding. Or give your guests bottles of liquid-bubble solution so they can blow good wishes in your direction.
Why not arrange the entire wedding to suit you and your guests?
This is ideal if your family and friends are scattered to the far corners of the earth. You bring them together for a long weekend at a nostalgic site; perhaps the small town where you grew up, or where your parents have a summer home.
Your celebration lasts several days, includes an elegant rehearsal dinner, a big Sunday brunch, plus other events such as softball games, backyard barbecues and sightseeing tours. It’s a great way for both sides of your families to get to know each other.
Worried about the price? Have everyone pitch in, from both sides, to help host the different events.
An (expensive) variation of the Long Weekend Wedding is the Faraway Wedding. You exchange your vows on the beach at Maui, on a hillside overlooking Jerusalem, or in a rustic mountain cabin surrounded by friends and family. Group festivities last a few days, then you bid everyone a fond adieu, and your honeymoon begins.
If you can’t get all your far-flung friends and relatives together at once, why not go and visit them?
In a progressive wedding, the bride and groom do all the traveling, they visit his hometown for a pre-wedding dinner, then on to hers for the ceremony.
The newlyweds then proceed to the city where they met, an uncle’s farm, a friend’s summer house, and so on, for post-nuptial parties and get togethers.
Share a romantic secret with your mate: Don’t let anyone in on your wedding plans.
Plan a party that lasts until dawn. A disc jockey will help keep people on their feet if he or she varies the beat from swing tunes to Motown.
Keep the food coming: start with substantial hors d’oeuvres, serve a midnight buffet of roast beef sandwiches, and lots of punch and wedding cake.
Finally, greet the new day with a hearty breakfast of omelets, lox and bagels, and fresh-squeezed orange juice.