My first wedding was big. I mean BIG. Big Dress, big cake, big wedding party, big guest list, big expenses. It was fun. That marriage lasted less than 3 years. Big lessons learned.
My second wedding - almost 5 years ago - was very small and simple. It was the best day of my life at that point.
We got married in our back yard, with a grand total of 16 people in attendance. There were no bridesmaids, groomsmen, flower girls or ring bearers. No stress. A friend played the guitar and sang, and another friend, a Lutheran minister, married us. The 10-minute ceremony was very simple, but the ceremony itself was still a blur. I remember the minister talking about what each of the letters in LOVE stood for. L is for Listening, but I couldn't remember what the other three letters stood for if my life depended on it.
This was a cheap but classy wedding, and it wasn't overdone. I found my dress for $100 on the rack at Dillard's. My husband purchased a new suit for the occasion, and that was our biggest expense. He needed one anyway, as all of his suits were getting old. I paid $25 for my bouquet from a local florist. My mother insisted we have a wedding cake, so she bought a very small one. My father-in-law and brother-in-law served as our photographers. After the ceremony, we took everyone out to eat at the restaurant where we had our first real date. It was (almost) perfect.
Spending so little on the wedding made it possible to take a nice honeymoon. OK, nice is an understatement. It was AWESOME! We spent 10 days in Salzburg and Vienna, Austria. It was the trip of a lifetime.
Looking back, I wouldn't change a thing about our wedding day. Keeping it simple and cheap made things stress-free and enabled us to put the money we would have spent on a fancy wedding toward our honeymoon. Because it was intimate and relaxed, we actually remembered hanging out with the people who mean the most to us. The delicious dinner afterward was the perfect way to end the day. I would highly recommend that kind of simple wedding to anyone.
I am in favor of small, or simple, weddings. Jeremy and I were going to go to a JP or to the courthouse, but I had to meet his mother before I would marry him. So we decided to have a wedding. I am so glad we kept it as simple as we did (though I could have gone even simpler). Jeremy wore his Class A's, I got my dress from Sears (but it wasn't a wedding dress), the cake came from Food Lion (back when they did wedding cakes), the flowers came from Piggly Wiggly (and they were very pretty). We got married in the glass chapel at Guido Gardens in Metter, GA and had the reception at my sister's house. We didn't get to have a honeymoon (we spent one night in a hotel at Tybee Island), but the whole thing was still very nice. I don't think having the big, expensive wedding/reception would have made the day any more special than it was. People get entirely too stressed out over a ceremony that will really only last a few minutes. Not that I don't love to attend the big weddings! :) Great blog!
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