wedding theme

Connecting Elements of Your Wedding Day

 in Celebration / Ceremony / Decor / Guests / Personalization / Rituals / Unity Rituals / Weddings  tagged wedding / wedding ceremony / wedding guests / wedding rituals / wedding theme / wedding venues / weddings by

Connecting elements of your wedding day together is a great way to tie your ceremony, your social hour, your dinner and your reception into a cohesive unit. Better yet if you connect the elements in a way that is meaningful to you as a couple. You can use thoughtfulness and creativity to accomplish a truly memorable experience by connecting elements of your wedding day in a meaningful way.

Begin by choosing a venue that represents a shared interest or has significance to you. Perhaps you enjoy wine. Choosing a vineyard or winery as your venue is a great start. Or for the railroad enthusiasts among you, perhaps renting a train for your wedding day is the way to go. Let’s create connections using those two examples.

The vineyard/winery venue offers a ceremony venue among the vines, with wine barrels in place of tables for the unity ritual or program distribution at the ceremony. Include a wine sharing or love letters and wine box ritual in the ceremony, and you’re on a roll. The social hour can feature your favorite wines which can follow through to dinner with wines selected for each course of your meal. Perhaps your cake is decorated in the colors of wine (reds, blushes, and creamy whites) or has a wine themed cake topper. Consider a takeaway for the guests of a wine glass or even a bottle of wine, and you’ve succeeded in connecting elements of your wedding day from start to finish.

For the railroad enthusiasts, you can hand out train whistles to your guests to serenade you as you share your first married kiss at the end of your ceremony. Those whistles can be used at the reception to call on you to kiss, and then be the guest takeaways at the end of the night. You might have a model train running around the cake table or the buffet table, and even choose a train themed song for your first dance.

Many of the ideas for connecting elements of your wedding day are not expensive, but require a bit of time and creativity. They serve to personalize your day and share a part of who you are with your guests. Each couple is unique, so celebrate who you are on your wedding day!

New Themes for Your Wedding

 in Ceremony / Weddings  tagged natural theme / new ceremony theme / new theme / wedding theme by

Consider new themes for your wedding to give it a fresh and personal look. I’m not a proponent of contrived themes in wedding ceremonies, but having a unifying idea or thread that runs through your ceremony can pull it all together and connect it to you as a couple. While we’re all familiar with holiday themes around Christmas, New Years and even the Fourth of July, consider utilizing some of the natural holidays of the year if your ceremony will take place near one of them.

I’m referring to the Winter and Summer Solstices and the Spring and Fall Equinoxes. Today marks the Spring Equinox – the day when the hours of daylight and darkness are equal. If this was your wedding day, the concepts of balance and equality in your marriage could be used. The idea of maintaining balance within yourself as an individual and as a part of this couple could be meaningful for some.

Summer Solstice ceremonies could invoke the image of the light that your love brings to your life. Or the growth that the sun’s light provides to the natural world, and the growth that your love will experience through marriage.

High summer wedding at Rochester Golf and Country Club

New themes for weddings around the Fall Equinox could focus on the beauty and colors the Fall season brings, the richness of the harvest of your love, or your confidence in the constancy of the cycles of life and love.

If you opt for a mid-December wedding, you can use the Winter Solstice as a metaphor for the confidence you have in your love as never ending and always changing. Candles in your decor and rituals could be lovely additions to your ceremony.

Whatever your wedding date, especially if you are having an outdoor wedding, consider new themes for your wedding based on the natural calendar and the natural world. There are many parallels to be drawn and ideas you can leverage throughout your ceremony via music, decor, readings and ritual to connect the ideas of love and marriage to the world around us.