It's wedding season again; quite a few people who read here, statistically speaking, are likely to attend a wedding sometime in the next three or four months. Weddings are often very non-crunchy affairs, but at first glance, this New York Times article seems to signal a refreshing trend toward simplicity and restraint in weddings, particularly among the wealthy:
AS the wedding season gets into full swing, many brides and bridegrooms are taking a decidedly down-home approach. Bring on the grilled steak, sweet potato fries and Rice Krispie treats (not to mention the checkered tablecloths). It's enough to have the most sophisticated bride scrambling for her grandmother's Betty Crocker cookbook.
The trend is most striking in Los Angeles, where the combination of money and show business has traditionally led to weddings as lavishly produced as any period-costume epic. This year, fewer guests will dine under crystal chandeliers or balls made of roses hanging from a gossamer-covered ceiling. Indeed, some Angelenos are taking the homespun ethos a step further, holding their wedding festivities in their own homes, or renting someone else's. [...]
Alas, perception is not quite reality:
While it stands to reason that a backyard supper or a catered affair at home might be cheaper than a hotel soiree, for many it actually costs just as much or more. Casual food is not necessarily a bargain, as restaurant diners from coast to coast can attest. [...]
For Shannon Jones of Los Angeles, the new thinking is indeed a sign of these times. She is having her reception -- an outdoor supper for 200 -- at a 1920s estate in Montecito on July 25. Ms. Jones, 26, and her fiancé, Michael Malik, 31, wanted to have what she called "a big summer backyard dinner," much like the weekend parties that have become common among her peers."More people are giving up dinner at Spago for a casual dinner at home with friends," she said.
So she skipped the once-popular pots of caviar and lobster tails, and decided to serve childhood favorites instead: grilled hanger steak marinated in herbs and home-baked peach cobbler. (There will be no wedding cake -- another traditional must-have many brides are skipping.)
Food will be dished up on platters and passed from person to person; bottles of wine will be put out on the tables so guests can serve themselves. The seating, too, will be picnic style -- long tables covered in burlap.
Despite the simple menu and surroundings, though, her wedding will cost more than if she had chosen a hotel. (She declined to say how much, although she described the amount as "sizable.") What she is hoping for, she said, is an experience that, despite months of preparation, seems unfussy and authentic.
When it comes to weddings, I think it's possible to say that we're at the far edge of a period of national insanity on the subject. The average cost of a wedding is currently around $20,000, down from a higher level of $27,490 before the recession got underway.
But is spending even $20,000--more than the annual income of a family of four living at poverty level in the United States--really much of a step in the right direction?
More:
I can't help but think that the drive to spend more and more on weddings isn't unlike the consumer drive I described yesterday. Just like I fight the impulse to own a certain number of wine glasses (even if I never use them) or pairs of high heels (even if I never wear them), so does the bride-to-be get inundated with messages about what her wedding day must be like--what she absolutely must have. Some of these messages come from what people jokingly call the Wedding Industrial Complex, and feature such notions that a man ought to spend two months' salary on his future wife's wedding ring, and that the presence of a $543 wedding cake for one's guests to enjoy is just expected.
And some of the messages come from a bride-to-be's family or friends. There is almost an expectation out there that if one is hosting a wedding, one is obligated to serve a sit-down, several course meal of steak, chicken, or lobster, and to see to one's guests' entertainment in the form of a not-too-obnoxious band to provide music for dancing. As costs quickly mount up, any hint from either side of the wedding party that a little simplicity and restraint might be nice can be dismissed with the catch-all phrase, "But what would people think?"
Which is why, despite the situation described in the New York Times article of faux authenticity and even more fake "savings" that are actually nonexistent, the phenomenon is at least a step in the right direction. Dismantling the popular expectations that a wedding begins with a very expensive diamond ring and ends with a staggering pile of bills from the caterer, photographer, bridal dress shop, florist, stationer, and a host of other people is a start; having the simple wedding come back in style, even if the simplicity is an illusion at the wealthier end of the spectrum, will eventually be a good thing for the middle-class bride who might not want a large and ostentatious wedding celebration.
Did anyone here have a simple, or even a crunchy, wedding? I'd love to hear about it!
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I've just posted about ours here, Rod-- complete with details, pictures, and the overall cost of less than $2000:
http://makinghome.blogspot.com/2009/06/our-simple-and-inexpensive-wedding.html
The main tip: use non-professional friends with skills in the areas you need & do all that you can yourself.
As the joke goes, a wedding plus reception and a funeral plus wake are functionally the same event. You have a ceremony, often in a church, with a religious leader presiding, you have people sing and talk. Afterward you take them all somewhere else and feed them and have a little party.
Obviously the mood is different (hopefully!), but in terms of actual things that are done, they are near identical.
And for funerals we manage to pull all that off in about a week, and it's a tiny fraction of the cost of a wedding. (And that is including burial in the cost of the funeral, and not including the wedding ring in the cost of the wedding.)
Clearly, something has gone horrible wrong with weddings. There is absolutely no reason that they should cost anywhere near that much. And it's not even the required 'wedding' part that's being gouged...if you feel you're required to have it in a church, you can usually find a reasonably priced one of your faith.
No, it's everything else that triples in price the second the word 'wedding' shows up. Like food.
My church regularly feeds large amounts of people for $10 a head. I can go into Ruby Tuesdays and get a very nice meal for $15, professionally made by an actual skilled chef. (I'm not holding them up as the epitome of food or anything, but the quality is roughly the same as catered weddings.) Add another bit for doing it on location, and no caterer should ever justify more than $20-$25, but I've heard prices quoted for weddings that were, yes, triple that!
In fact, I know you can get catered food that cheap, as I volunteered at a dinner theater, where you got food and a show. We charge $30 total for the whole thing.
That's just one of the many things that the wedding industrial complex has managed to hijack. And shamefully, the catering industry has gone along with it. If you're planning a wedding reception, call up and have them cater a 'dinner party' and get all the prices from that, and then just buy a wedding cake from a bakery.
We got married last August for just over $4,000 (that includes EVERYTHING - clothes, food, sites, printing costs, photography, flowers, etc), and it was everything I ever wanted it to be. We got married in a beautiful Greek Orthodox church, full of flowers, with about 150 people. I had the exact dress I wanted. My aunt, grandmother, and cousins did all the flower arrangements. We got our flowers by finding a farmer at the farmer's market we liked and telling him we'd take his whole truckload :) Our reception was at our church, another Orthodox church that sits on 9 acres of beautiful grounds down a long dirt road. Family friends brought their sound equipment and played music from my husband's MacBook. A friend of my mom's made a gorgeous wedding cake, and ladies from church made huge amounts of hummus, tabouli, pasta salad, fruit skewers, Lebanese rice, and who knows what else. My sister made a huge vat of sangria, and a Serbian friend of ours showed up at 6 am the day of the wedding to roast us a pig! I woke up early the day of the wedding to pick an armful of lavendar from our back field so my sister could make glass jugs of lavender lemonade.
My aunt made my jewelry by stringing my baptismal cross with pearls and crystals. My cousin did everyone's hair and makeup. My four flower girls wore beautiful white dresses their mom found on clearance for less than $20 each. The one thing that was most important to me was the invitations and programs - I had a definite idea of exactly what I wanted, and no idea how to get it. My husband designed them both, my mom, her friend, my husband and I hand stamped and embossed a gold Orthodox cross on each one, and my friends assembled and addressed them. My husband scanned the same cross and our engagement photo onto the programs. Our photographer was the best I ever could have asked for, and charged us $500.
Really, every single part of it was better than hiring a caterer and a florist to serve up surely inferior food and nice matchy matchy floral arrangements. Our wedding was extravagant in my eyes, because of how much our friends and family gave of their time and talents.
My husband and I were married in December 2005, and the whole shebang cost about $2500. The ceremony was held far from our hometowns, so friends from our church really came through and put the whole thing together. It was wonderful to have them all involved, and it was worth so much more than having "professionals" that come with a much higher price. Our reception was simple -- no band or dancing -- but people afterward told us it was a wedding they had enjoyed more than many others. People sat and talked and ate for hours. We celebrated our day with about 60 people, and had time to chat with them all, and even to eat at our reception. It was perfect!
My husband and I were married last year and we had a budget of $800. Did we pull it off? Yep! And we had a wonderful wedding, too. Our wedding was in a Catholic Church, which cost nothing (though we gave small monetary gifts to the priest and altar boys). The reception was at a park...nothing fancy; there was a playground and a pool and a huge gazebo, usually used for birthday parties and family reunions. The permit for the park, along with an alcohol permit, was our most expensive thing. My husband and our ring bearer wore suits bought from Walmart.com (which is also where our rings came from). My dress was a gift...a friend paid for the materials and her mother sewed it. Even if it had not been a gift, though, the cost was no more than $200 (not including labor) and it was gorgeous. It looked like a "real" wedding dress. My shoes came from a thrift store (though I doubt they had ever been worn...not bad for $1) and my flowers (fake) came from the Dollar store. Decorations were limited to white table cloths for the picnic tables, and beautiful candles that my sister made (another "freebie"). The photography was done by my brother, an ameteur photographer with very nice equipment, for free (it was his gift to us). I had a friend borrow my camcorder to record the wedding (it's not by any means professional, but I have it recorded and that's all that really matters). We had two cakes: one was a sheet cake from a grocery store (I think it was about $20) and the other was a small, "fancy" cake that I made myself and topped with a porcelin wedding couple I bought from the dollar store. The food was a bit expensive...we had about 100 guests. We found a local pizza place that also did catering and ordered fried chicken and roast beef, along with salads, rolls, side dishes and deserts (not to mention paper plates and utensils, drinks and cups). For invitations, I bought some pretty stationary (for less than $3) and printed them on my home computer. For music, my cousin brought his sound system and collection of mp3s. I had a wonderful wedding and would not have done anything differently. I don't feel like I missed out on anything, either. I had a close friend have a wedding a year before mine, and another close friend having a wedding this year, and when they show me all they're buying it makes me want to tear my hair out.
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