Wedding Invitations

Raise your hand if you’re newly engaged and are beginning to feel overwhelmed! It’s not at all unusual to feel overwhelmed at the thought of all there is to do to plan your wedding.  If you are unsure of where to begin, let us help out. We thought we’d give a few pointers to get you started, as well as a reminder that it won’t go on forever and all that hard work will result in a beautiful day for you and your future spouse to remember for years to come.

It might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people get stuck on this one:  selecting the date, or even just the month or season, of the wedding.   You don’t necessarily have to have a firm date and time squared away within 72 hours of that engagement ring going on your finger, that’s definitely not in any wedding etiquette or planning guides, but a general idea of how much time you’ll have to plan this wedding is a handy thing to have, both for you and for your family and other members of your wedding party. Have you always dreamed of a spring wedding? Or perhaps the thought of a Christmas wedding gets your heart racing. These are the kinds of date-setting we’re talking about. From there, you can go on to pick locations for both ceremony and reception, wedding gowns, flowers, and bridesmaid dresses. But without the date, you can’t make very many firm plans.

It’s important to also keep in mind that many wedding-related items must be ordered months in advance, such as the gowns and the wedding invitations. Factor in that wedding etiquette also advises that it’s best to send invitations out anywhere between one to two months before the wedding, and you’ll quickly see that there’s a lot more planning involved than you might have originally thought.  Let’s get started!

The weather on a couples’ wedding day is one of those issues that, try as hard as you might, just cannot be controlled. While most brides dream of a beautiful, sunny day for their wedding day’s weather, the truth is that a rainy wedding day could actually be even more desirable. After all, there’s a superstition out there that says it’s good luck for the newlyweds to have a rainy wedding day. Even better? Seeing a rainbow on your wedding day…and it’s hard to find rainbows without first having rain.

Of course, not every wedding takes place on a sunny Saturday afternoon in June. There’s a great many weddings in other seasons and times of day. I’ve been to snowy weddings, evening weddings, even an early-morning wedding (that one was very challenging to be on-time for). The weather – good or bad – had practically zero negative effect on the weddings, ceremonies, or even the marriages. Well, okay, maybe there was that one time the caterer slipped on some ice and dropped the wedding cake, but the odds of that happening again are astronomical.

Wedding etiquette doesn’t really have a position on wedding day weather, but wedding planners would advise – especially for brides and grooms having an outdoor wedding – that a backup plan be in place in case of foul or even merely unpleasant wedding-day weather. Shortly before my brother’s wedding, massive rainstorms filled the weather forecasts, and we bought every umbrella in town so that his wedding guests could enjoy the ceremony. In the end, the rain stopped almost exactly an hour before the ceremony and didn’t start up again until the happy couple was off on their honeymoon.