Wedding planning can be overwhelming. Find out how to stay whelmed with advice for your planning, your stag or hen do, ceremony, and reception.
And we have advice from real couples on the best ideas you should steal – and what you should avoid – from their weddings.
Throwing a stag do is hard.
It shouldn’t be – getting a group of your favourite people in a room and enjoying their company shouldn’t need to be difficult. Or expensive. Or the basis for a string of questionable comedy films.
Stag dos stem from the days when a Victorian gentleman would take all his single chums to dinner at the club as a last hurrah – because it would be improper to ever socialise with them again once he was married.
As ridiculous as the idea may seem, it’s also ridiculously simple: dinner and drinks. Maybe some cigars if they were going big.
These days, people expect stag dos to be much grander affairs. They can’t be like any night out anyone has had before. (Even though it’s extremely unlikely the bachelor has ever had a night out with every single one of his friends and family before anyway.) They expect something spectacular – if not a weekend of spectacular things, each more spectacular than the last!
These days, a whole industry has sprung up around stag dos. (No, not the one you’re thinking of. That’s much older.)
I’m a big advocate of little touches – the small details that really tie a project together.
Whenever you’re creating something, whether it’s artwork or cupcakes or Halloween costumes, it’s attention to detail that takes your project from being good to being incredible. It’s especially true when planning a wedding; the little details are what makes the day memorable and unique to you as a couple.
When it comes to weddings, people still push disposable cameras. Etsy shops sell them as essential for your wedding day. Advice blogs tell you they’re the cheapest way to get fun, impromptu wedding pictures.
But they all seem to forget five crucial things:
1. It’s freaking difficult to get film developed these days. Where does it?!
2. If you manage to find somewhere, you have to pay to get the pictures developed as well as for the cameras – and anything that difficult to track down isn’t going to be cheap.
3. You can’t preview a traditional photograph or delete it and re-take it if it’s of a massive, blurry thumb, so most of the roll will be the same pictures again and again, in the hope one of them turned out – which is annoying when you have a hard limit on how many pictures you can take.
4. Disposable cameras – disposable anything, really – are terrible for the environment. They’re made of metal and plastic that could be put to much better use.
5. Every one of your guests has a much better camera already, in their pockets. And they’ll happily take pictures for you. For free!
There’s a tradition in British weddings known as flowers-for-the-mums. You say it as a single word, in a single breath; the notion that a newly married person will be doling out a bouquet and a ‘ta for raising me’ is so innocuous, so ingrained, flowers-for-the-mums is listed off in that single breath on every checklist, every etiquette book, every planning podcast.
Flowers-for-the-mums is a wedding-by-numbers activity, expected to happen the same way, at the same time, at every wedding – no matter what the wedding, or the couple getting married, is like.
Have you ever googled how to give a wedding speech as a bride or groom? (I realise that’s probably how you found this article, but bear with me.)
The advice is always the same: you’ve got the easy job, just thank everyone.
The problem with that is it assumes the person giving the speech knows how to make a list of thank yous interesting. But if our best and brightest actors can’t do that come Oscar season, how are the rest of us meant to manage?
Because it’s not just thank yous – it’s thank yous you’re doing in front of your entire wedding. It’s thank yous as entertainment.