Weddingbee Blog

By this point you may be thinking, “Miss Aardvark! We loved your cute stories about budding love, but this is not a biography! You said you were going to be talking about your wedding!” And you are right! Let’s take a break from all the “getting to know you” niceties and talk about the main event (or at least the kickoff to the main event, the wedding—the real main event being the marriage, of course).

When Mr. Aardvark and I first got engaged, and perhaps a little before that, we knew we wanted an inexpensive, simple wedding with our nearest and dearest around us. This is not what we had in mind:

 We wanted a Catholic ceremony with Mass, followed by a party—not a grand ball. So I started looking at “laid-back” weddings to get an idea of how that could be pulled off. Type “casual wedding reception” into Google and there are all sorts of things that pop up. Very elaborate “casual” weddings. People building tent villages on the beach or English gardens in their backyards…not ballroom, maybe, but still a little more fromal than we were looking for!

Image via Travels in Ireland

In the beginning we thought we would be footing the bill and there was no room for clear acrylic chairs and rose topiary. We were thinking about going old school with a cake-and-punch reception at the American Legion. And not the kind of old school where every place setting is a different antique plate. (Although I LOVE that idea and think if you can find/store/use antique china you totally should because they are SO beautiful!) We were thinking something along the line of this:

Image via Taylored Weddings / This is more our speed.

Granted, I may have tied ribbons to the folding chairs and put a bit more pizazz into the tables, but this was much more our speed. I did not want to set up unrealistic expectations for the wedding, and I did not want to go into debt.

Then things shifted. The first shift came when we started talking about our guest list. Before the planning had begun in earnest, we had discussed having 100 guests, give or take. We both have large families, so we though this would be the most reasonable “small” number.

HA! We sat down one night to each write our own list and, about 15 minutes in, each of is had a list of over 80 people. In case you are no good with numbers that would be more than 60% over our first number. Then our parents sent in their lists and it grew again, this time swelling to over 250 people! Eep!

However, all was not lost. Even before the list began ballooning, our parents also VERY generously offered to contribute. Three sets of parents (I have two sets—more on that later) all offered an amount about equal to our first budget. That’s right, folks. Our budget TRIPLED just like that. We were so grateful and blessed!

Then came the realization that A) all of these people would not fit in the original venue (which had fortunately not been booked yet); B) many would be traveling to get there, and they would want more than cake and punch to eat; and C) casual small talk and an iPod would not a party make for a crowd of that size—we’d need to find a DJ or emcee or something more “wedding-y” to keep going after the eating part of the day.

We did not want anything too stuffy, but we also did not want to cram our nearest and dearest (all 250 of them) into a big ugly warehouse-type space. We were off to find a middle ground. Something fun, big enough for all our guests, not too ballroom-y, and “us.” With our expanded budget, this proved easier than expected. Maybe we were looking at something more along these lines:

Did your wedding vision shift dramatically one way or the other while planning?