From the very beginning of my own wedding planning I KNEW I wanted to take notes the entire time and share a big blog after to share all the tips and things we did to plan a wedding without the headache that comes along. Because if you are in the middle of wedding planning right now or you have planned a wedding in the past, you know that wedding planning can SUCK. A LOT.
I want to give you actual advice and steps to plan and have the wedding of your dreams without the debt or the pain of it all. So I have created this blog to give you my TOP 5 tips to how to make wedding planning EASY, FUN and ENJOYABLE – 3 things that you are probably not using to describe it right now.
3. The wedding is about the MARRIAGE. So often we forget that we are getting MARRIED and the reason for the wedding in the first place was to have a covenant before God and marry our best friend. The media, movies, and our culture has changed weddings into these HUGE epic days that have to be expensive and perfect and extravagant and if they aren’t then it isn’t as fun. Well you know what? My grandmother got married in her church with a pastor and their congregation and that was it. No flowers, no dress, no reception, no photographer, nothing. And then they spent their honeymoon in a motel that was so cheap the shower fell over while my grandpa was in it. And they’ve been married 60 years and had the most beautiful life. Because their life was what the wedding was about, not the wedding itself.
Wedding Planning brings out the worst in you sometimes. You grew up dreaming about this day and you want it to be PERFECT and you don’t want to settle on any of the things you are dreaming about. Honestly, I even expected myself to be perfect. I expected my teeth to be white, my hair to be long, my skin to be tan and my body to be perfectly skinny. I expected to get all the decorations that were on my Pinterest board and everything about the entire day to be exactly like I was dreaming. I expected the tables to look a certain way and the chairs to be the one on Junebug Weddings. But that just isn’t reality. And more than that – it is exhausting and isn’t a fair way to think about anything, especially yourself. Things go wrong, plans fall through, decorations are too expensive and pandemics happen that shut down the whole country. If your focus is on how perfect the wedding can be, planning will be miserable, stressful, depressing and exhausting. But the days that my focus was on MARRYING Aaron and not the wedding itself, it was exciting, joyful, beautiful, and everything I ever dreamed it to be. When marriage was my focus, none of those other things mattered as much. I was marrying my best friend, so if all the flowers weren’t perfect or if the table cloths weren’t as pretty as the wooden tables that were too expensive, it didn’t matter. Because the reason I was having a wedding was to marry my best friend, and that was perfect.
4. Ask others for help. When you are the only one planning, it sucks. Plain and simple. Especially if you don’t have a wedding planner. But you are surrounded by people who love you and want to help you. Me and Aaron had a very tight budget so we couldn’t afford to hire vendors for everything we were wanting to do. So instead of going into debt, we did it all ourselves. Flowers, cake, food, decorations, music, etc.
Honestly, this was one of my favorite parts of my entire wedding weekend. Every single part of my wedding was special and intimate. Right down to the cake. Every piece of my wedding was made, owned or put together by one of my friends or family. We had an army to help us, but it made every part of my wedding that much more special. My grandmother made my wedding cake. My mom and my mother in law put together all of the flowers. My in laws put together all of the table settings and we used their family glasses for the décor. My uncle and brother in law strung lights in the backyard for us. My family friends sang during our entire ceremony and my dad officiated my wedding. I couldn’t have done any of that on my own. But it was made possible because of the army of loved ones who came alongside us and made our wedding happen.