For those who’ve been following my family’s story: The wedding is over. My daughter is now married. There were no major disasters. But it was a mediocre wedding, and some of you might find the reasons for this informative.
Several of the issues reflect the fact that my daughter and her new husband chose to get married in the area where both of them grew up and where many of their family and friends still live, rather than in the city 2000 miles away where they live now.
One of the three entrees served at the reception was awful – so awful that most people who ordered it didn’t eat it. And the cake was sickeningly sweet. If the wedding had been held near the bride and groom’s home, this wouldn’t have happened. They would have had a tasting at the venue and another at the bakery, and they could have avoided the terrible entree and picked less intense cake frosting and fillings. But because the wedding was held so far from their home, there were no tastings.
Another thing you can do if you get married where you live is have a trial run with your hair stylist. My daughter couldn’t do this. Her stylist had to work on her without ever having seen her before. It showed.
Also, people got bored at the reception. My daughter and her husband did not want speeches, toasts, or scripted dances (the kind where particular people are forced to dance with each other). So the reception just consisted of a meal, cake cutting, and general dancing – and it went on for too long. They ended up asking the DJ to stop playing an hour earlier than scheduled because people were obviously eager to leave. The lesson here, I think, is that if you cut out some of the ritual stuff that’s usually done at weddings, you may want to shorten the wedding as a whole.
I am the day of wedding coordinator for my sister’s niece’s wedding next month. A friend is coming to help me out and her primary job during the reception is to watch the gift table and card box. The bride is very worried about some of her relatives and their sticky fingers.
There were only two gifts brought to the wedding that were not in envelopes. But remember that this was a small wedding – about 45 people.
The two gifts will fit in my daughter’s carry-on – the one that was used to transport her wedding gown on the plane. To create space for the gifts, I took the wedding gown home to my house in my car. I’ll get it dry cleaned, and eventually my daughter will decide whether she wants to sell it. So gifts were not a problem for us, but they might be for others. (Of course, at some point I may have to ship the dress. But I don’t have to do it today.)
I can’t dance because of a bad knee. So I watched over any envelopes or other gifts until our day-of-wedding coordinator had a chance to bring them up to the bride’s guest room at the hotel. She made several trips up there during the course of the wedding.
Some people also gave gifts at the family dinner (which was our substitute for a rehearsal dinner since there was no rehearsal) the night before, but they were all the kind in envelopes, and the bride was carrying her normal (huge) purse, so those gifts were not a problem.
Congrats to your D! I am glad that you survived and there were no disasters.
I hope that the guests were the people you and your D care about and that you did get to
enjoy visiting with them.
You have hit the nail on the head as far as my concerns go for next weekend’s wedding.
I fear that D and FSIL are minimizing the importance of the details even with 21 guests.
They did do tastings and they chose the less expensive venue. The slightly higher venue
is a newer place and would have bent over backwards for them. Their choice is good not great
but all 4 times H and I have been in this restaurant there has been an issue either with poor
service or the food not being prepared as asked. Always friendly and make it right but still.
We are taking extra bottles of wine and I have purchased ones with screw off tops. I can just imagine
the waitstaff disappearing and folks waiting for more wine.
D’s BGF, H an I did the cake tasting. And I went to the bakery and ordered it myself. Will
follow up on Friday.
Their big dance is the next week and I am not part of that planning which is a relief.
There are so many details --those little things such as plates for the meet and greet–
I have no idea if they are onto such stuff or not.
I hope your D and her new H are happy with how things went last night.
I know part of my work will be to NOT point out to them any flaws or errors
after the fact. DuckTape will be needed and used.
I think D has a make up and hair trail but I will check.
Thank you so much for posting. I have thought about your MOB day all weekend.
You survived and they had the wedding the way they decided which is something.
My own was completely highjacked and it is still a sore spot with me.
The nicest part of my daughter’s wedding was something unexpected – the children in attendance LOVED it.
There were 7 kids there – all age 7 and under – and the three oldest were the happiest people there. They couldn’t get enough of the dance floor. They danced with each other. They danced with their parents. They danced with their grandparents and the bride and groom and anyone else they could drag out there, including a couple of the toddlers.
The kids (including the toddlers) also loved the gift bags we had made for them (with age-appropriate toys for each child). And the parents loved that, too. The gift bags were at each child’s place at the reception, and the toys distracted them enough so that the parents could eat (this was the whole idea).
It was really cute. But on the other hand, the wedding cost roughly $17,000, which is a heck of a lot of money to pay for a children’s party.
A thing to think about for that hair and makeup trial:
In most weddings (except Jewish under-the-canopy ones), the bride stands on the left, facing the groom. This means that the audience is looking at the right side of her face.
This matters if the bride is wearing her hair down, as my daughter did. It would be nice to be able to see the bride’s face during the ceremony, but this requires styling the hair so that it doesn’t obscure the right side of the bride’s face.
My daughter had her hair down and curled. She wore a decorative clip on one side of her head that pulled the hair back on that side. Unfortunately, the stylist placed it on the left side of her head. If she had placed it on the right side instead, it would have been easy for everyone to see my daughter’s face at the ceremony. But as it is, her hair hid much of her face. She is not going to be happy when she gets her ceremony pictures back.
(Of course, we did not think of this ahead of time. But it was obvious during the ceremony.)
I liked my daughter’s dress very much when she chose it (I was with her at the time).
I still liked it, but not quite so much, when she wore it at her wedding.
The dress she wore did not look exactly like the dress she had tried on even though it was the correct dress.
When you try on a wedding dress, what you’re trying on is a sample, which may not be in your size. The salesperson does complicated things in the back with clamps to make it fit. The fit of that clamped sample may be different from that of the right-sized dress you would actually buy, but you make your decisions about dresses based on the way you look in the samples.
In my daughter’s case, the neckline of the dress she actually bought was lower than that of the sample dress, making it more revealing than she had intended, and the waistline hit her in a different place, which was not as flattering.
However, none of this really matters. What matters is that her husband absolutely loved the way she looked in the dress.
A thing to think about for that hair and makeup trial:
In most weddings (except Jewish under-the-canopy ones), the bride stands on the left, facing the groom. This means that the audience is looking at the right side of her face.
This matters if the bride is wearing her hair down, as my daughter did. It would be nice to be able to see the bride’s face during the ceremony, but this requires styling the hair so that it doesn’t obscure the right side of the face.
My daughter had her hair down and curled. She wore a decorative clip on one side of her head that pulled the hair back on that side. Unfortunately, the stylist placed it on the left side of her head. If she had placed it on the right side instead, it would have been easy for everyone to see my daughter’s face at the ceremony. But as it is, her hair obscured her face, almost to the point of making her look like one of those troll dolls. She is not going to be happy when she gets her ceremony pictures back.
We did food tasting few months ago. We liked most of the entrees and asked them to tweak some. It was the chef who actually made the food for us because they were all of his new own recipes based on our requests (with a bit of Asian influence).
I asked the venue coordinator to add in the contract - in the case if the current chef should no longer be with the venue then we would require another food tasting with the new chef. The coordinator thought I was crazy. I said no, because food was important to us. She added it in.
Marian - the wedding went without any problems and the couple looked good, so I say it was a success.
@oldfort, although things did generally go well, you wouldn’t have thought so if you were there just before the ceremony started.
The night before the wedding, one of the groom’s brothers had borrowed his dad’s car. He wanted to avoid having to use mass transit to get himself and his family to the wedding, and the dad, who had come from out of town and was staying at a place within walking distance of the wedding venue, didn’t need the car.
The time came for people to be seated for the ceremony, but the brother and his family hadn’t arrived. So a decision was made to wait 15 minutes. Still no brother. So a decision was made to seat the guests (in the outdoor courtyard, where it was unseasonably cool to the point of discomfort for women in summer dresses) and start the ceremony without him. Suddenly, in runs the brother, frantic because he can’t get the engine in his dad’s car to turn off (possibly because it’s a hybrid, and he may have been unfamiliar with the controls). Out run the brother and his dad (the groom’s father), off to deal with the car issue – with the car parked three blocks away.
Now we’re stuck. All the guests are sitting in the cold courtyard, and both the groom’s father and the groom’s brother have disappeared. It was unthinkable to start without the groom’s father, so we continued to wait. Fifteen minutes later, the father and brother returned, and FINALLY the ceremony took place.
Perhaps we should feel lucky, though. The bride and groom have six siblings between them. Only one managed to create a crisis.
That must have been very stressful Marian. I would have been quite upset. But a few years from now I’ll bet it will be something everyone looks back at and laughs.
