Eat, Drink, and Be Married

I can see why people elope.

I’m not saying that I don’t want a wedding. I really, really do. It fits into the life I’ve imagined for myself.

All I want is for someone to plan it for me and pay for it all. Is that too much to ask?

The wedding day is just under five months away. As we have begun to make the first in a series of expensive decisions, and as we make a very long itemized to-do list, I just keep thinking, “City Hall would be so much simpler. Or Vegas.”

But I’m a romantic, I love a good party, and the wedding just wouldn’t be as meaningful to me without my loved ones present, so Darren and I are going forward with a full-blown wedding. But eloping no longer seems like the travesty that I’d once thought it was.

Darren and I have been so consumed with work lately that we haven’t devoted much time to wedding planning. According to Real Simple Weddings (a special edition of the magazine and my favorite resource so far), we are on track with most things but behind on a few others. Here are just a few items that we have checked off from each section:

Sixteen to Nine Months Before

First of all, I almost had heart failure when I read the words “sixteen…months before.” We got engaged twelve months before the wedding. Throw me a bone here, people. I haven’t been planning this thing since I was ten.

• Start a wedding folder or binder. My grandma very thoughtfully sent me a three-ring binder called Tying the Knot: The Complete Wedding Organizer (Wedding Planner). It has durable plastic covers,  breaks down every step of the planning, and contains plastic sleeves in each section to hold loose papers. It’s also very, very girly, covered with pink and cursive. It has a bride on the cover, not a bride and a groom. This made me wonder how many grooms help plan their own weddings, and how many of those grooms use wedding planning binders. I’d venture to say, “Not many straight ones.”
  
  
• Settle on a head count. Ours is somewhere between 140 and 160. Deciding how many people our venue and budget could accommodate was, without question, the most stressful part of the wedding. We have pretty extensive networks in both Jackson and California, and there was no way we could invite everyone. This was the compromise: we’ll be asking our Jackson network to come out with us after the reception, and inviting our California friends to a potluck celebration next spring. This means we won’t have to eat pork and beans for a year so we can cover our wedding expenses.

Eight Months Before

• Purchase a dress. I owe this one to my sister and Matron of Honor, Gill (whom I love to remind that she is oh-so matronly). While we were both in California this past July, she suggested that we pay a visit to San Francisco’s Jessica McClintock outlet. Turns out that all wedding dresses were half off because Jessica McClintock is no longer designing wedding dresses and she’s clearing out her inventory. I’d had no expectation that we would leave the store with a wedding dress, but we left after only an hour with a wedding dress AND and an after-party dress. For $150. Yes, for both. If not for the no-returns policy, I would have peed myself with joy.

• Book the photographer and videographer. Before we even got engaged, I knew that the first vendor we booked would be Adam Hudson Photography. Darren and I had met husband-and-wife team Adam & Allison Hudson through the wedding column I used to write, and they a) took amazing pictures, and b) were a lot of fun. Their policy is not to take on as a client anyone whom they wouldn’t be friends with, because they need to feel a personal connection to their subjects. Thank God they think we’re cool.

We’re not hiring a videographer, because the only person who would want to relive our wedding on video is Darren’s mom. (My own mom will freely admit that she wouldn’t watch it, and I don’t blame her.) Instead, we’re going to ask friends to take little snippets of candid video from their digital cameras, and we’ll compile them on iMovie.

Seven to Six Months Before

• Shop for the bridesmaids’ dresses. Whew, I don’t need to worry about this one. I asked my bridesmaids to wear black cocktail dresses in any length or style that suits them. This saves me the hassle of coordinating the dresses, and it’ll allow each bridesmaid to choose from her existing wardrobe or buy a dress that she can wear again.
• Send save-the-date cards, if you plan to do so. Oh, the advantages of marrying a professional designer! Darren will be posting to the blog about his beautiful save-the-date design, which we emailed out recently using mailchimp.com. MailChimp is a brilliant service that walked us through designing email blasts and creating separate lists of folks who would receive them (Wedding/Wedding Party/CA Potluck/Jackson after-party). The basic version is free.

So now we’re in the Five to Four Months Before range. It makes me a bit nervous to be here instead of comfortably in the six-month range, but maybe that will give us the push we need to get moving.

Real Simple tells us that this month, we’re supposed to book the rehearsal dinner venue, and select and order the cake. I’m supposed to try out hairdressers and makeup artists, purchase shoes, and start my dress fittings. We also should choose songs and compile welcome baskets for guests.

Because we already have deposits down with the venue and the photographers, we will definitely not be eloping.

Gulp.

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