How I Planned Your Wedding

by Susan Wiggs

  Certainly there was the frugal angel sitting on my shoulder, reminding me that most invitations end up in the trash, that nobody can tell the difference between 10 percent and 45 percent rag content, that going into debt over deckle edges and felt finishes was silly. I still agree with that angel, too—nothing in a wedding is worth going into debt over.

  However, there was the other angel on my shoulder who reminded me that invitations were my opportunity to set the tone for the wedding. Sending guests a beautiful, thoughtful invitation was the first step in showing my gratitude for their support and willingness to be there for such an important moment in my life. I wanted each guest to know that we would be honored by his or her presence. A poorly thought-out invitation printed on scrap paper obviously wouldn’t cut it.

  And then there was the third angel in my life—the one I call Mommy—who had an entirely different idea for me. Still fixated on trying to get me to set my priorities on practicalities, my mother suggested that Dave and I send e-vites for our invitations. Yep. E-vites. When I reminded her that her own parents would probably be challenged, to say the least, by an email wedding invitation, she came up with this: “Well, send nice paper invitations to the old people who don’t know how to use computers, and then e-vites to everyone else.”

  Right, Mom.

  I knew there was a middle ground, an invitation that was nicer than a spam message mass email but not as extravagant as an engraved sterling silver plaque—but I had no clue what that invitation looked like. I ramped up for yet another slog through the impossible tangle of wedding information on the internet, but eight hours later all I knew was that DIY invitations would take me sixty-seven hours to complete and that the cost of stamps would increase by two cents less than a week after I planned on sending my invitations (meaning I had no room for delays). So, like any smart bride with limited time and a billion things to think about, I decided to pretend I didn’t have to worry about invitations. Smart, huh?

  A few weeks later, with my invitation worries carefully quarantined in a part of my brain, I got a phone call. My friend (and eventual bridesmaid) Aubrey was on the other end, and she was about to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse: she had just started a letterpress company called Atlas & Campbell with her colleague, Tracy, and she wanted to design our invitations for us. The best part? She said her labor was a gift—all we had to pay for was materials.

  Now, let’s pause for a minute and have a little reality check. Most newly engaged gals don’t have a close friend who just happened to start a letterpress company. I know that. But you’d be surprised how many connections you have that can help you out as you plan your wedding. That girlfriend who’s an executive assistant? She orders flower arrangements for her office all the time and can hook you up with a local florist who’s willing to give discounts to friends. Your brother who likes to woo the ladies with his emotional acoustic guitar playing? He can perform the musical interlude during your ceremony. Your fiancé’s ex-girlfriend who started her own photography business? Not only can she be your photographer, but she’ll feel so guilty over the way she dumped your man that she’ll give you her services free of charge.

  Just kidding about that last one. She’d probably intentionally take photos of you right when you’ve got a double chin.

  Well, Aubrey was my clutch wedding connection. For the cost of postage, paper, ink and letterpress plates, Dave and I got one-of-a-kind, custom invitations complete with hand-stitching, vellum bellybands, and the rich texture left by a centuries-old printing machine. Here’s the thing, though: paper is totally expensive. Even with free design labor and a friend who was trying her hardest to find me rock-bottom deals on materials, Dave and I were looking at spending upwards of a thousand bucks on our invitations.

  That was 5 percent of our whole wedding budget.

  With a heavy heart, I prepared to call Aubrey and tell her that I didn’t think we were going to be able to afford her design services.

  Dave saw me pouting as I picked up the phone and asked what was wrong. I burst into tears.

  “We can’t even afford PAPER for our wedding invitations! Do you hear me??! PAPER! We’re going to have to send—” I snorfed a bubble of snot back into my nose “—e-viiiiiites!”

  Dave looked at me like I had sprouted two heads. Enraged, I tried to force his understanding. “E-vites!” I screeched. “God! Nobody’s going to come to our wedding because they’ll be so off ended that we sent…we sent…E-VITES!”

  Like a practiced diva, I flounced dramatically into the bedroom, flung myself on the bed and commenced an unprintable wailing session.

  Dave knew he had to follow me, or else.

  Gingerly, he sat on the edge of the bed and patted my shoulder. “It’s okay,” he murmured.

  “NO IT’S NOT!!!” I shrieked. “Do you understand what this means? It means that my mother…was…was…was RIGHT!” This thought brought a new feeling of hopelessness. I curled into a ball and stuffed the corner of my pillow into my mouth. (I’ve found this move to be very effective when you want people to think you’re in need of serious attention and TLC.)

  Dave was quiet for a moment.

  I sneaked a peek at him from beneath my wet eyelashes. I recognized his expression as the same one he gets when he figures out how to build an IKEA shelf without any instructions—frustrated but enlightened.

  I waited for him to speak.

  “Actually…” he started slowly “…your mom may have been onto some thing.”

  “WHAT?! You can’t be serious.”

  I looked at him with the eyes of a crazy person, ready to declare him a traitor who wasn’t fit to be in my presence.

  Dave looked thoughtful again. “What if we got people to RSVP online? We could still send the invitations that Aubrey designed, but we can get rid of those little envelope thingies [that’s what he called the RSVP cards] and probably save on a ton of paper. And we’re only inviting, what, seven older relatives who don’t use computers? We can just call them.”

  Well, I hadn’t seen that coming. But immediately I realized that my future husband had come up with a great idea. Having a paperless RSVP system could dramatically reduce our costs. And, for karmic brownie points, it was eco-friendly.

  I called Aubrey and told her Dave’s idea. She was immediately onboard, and within the hour I had a revised invitation design. On the vellum insert that would be bound to the main body of the invitation, she added the line “Kindly reply by July 1 through our website, wiggsanddave.com.”

  The next day, I spent an hour building a form on our website (a search for “website form builder” returned a plethora of easy-to-use tools) that guests could fill out with the number of people in their party, the full names of everyone who would be attending (for place cards) and a little space for a message to us. When they clicked “Submit,” their responses were sent to the email account that I had created especially for the wedding.

  Done.

  Our paperless RSVP system, combined with some killer deals Aubrey was able to snag from her paper supplier, cut our invitation costs in half. Nobody said a word about the missing RSVP cards. At least, not to my face.

  And—What do you know?—my mom’s original e-vite idea, while completely abhorrent to me, ended up being the inspiration for our eco-and wallet-friendly invitations.

  Something tells me she wasn’t surprised by that.

  INVITATIONS: THE BRIDAL GATEWAY DRUG

  All right, I’ll admit it. I couldn’t stop at just one fancy letterpress project. As with Franco Sarto mid-heel pumps, my first purchase merely opened the door for more. But this is where the real value of a dedicated designer comes into play. Aubrey and Tracy knew the exact fonts, styles and colors of our invitations and were able to create a whole wedding suite for us that coordinated with the original theme of our invitations. When I called Aubrey in a panic ten days before the wedding, freaking out that I hadn’t even started thinking about our wedding programs, she calmly told me she had it
covered and created two hundred beautiful eight-page, hand-sewn booklets that featured all the readings from our ceremony, the names of our bridesmaids and groomsmen, directions to the reception venue and the names of our deceased relatives who we wanted to remember on our wedding day.

  Then, five days before the wedding, I called Aubrey in hysterics, realizing I had completely forgotten to create place cards. This was a particular tragedy because not only had Dave and I spent hours assigning our guests to tables, we had spent the last nine months working on what I liked to call Project Place Card.

  See, there’s nothing I hate more than making small talk. At weddings, there are three questions you can always expect: “Where are you from?” “How do you know the bride or groom?” and “What do you do?” So I decided to save my guests from the hell of inane conversation by printing an interesting conversation starter on each of their place cards. We’d come up with 232 tidbits about our guests, hunting down details about our friends’ dates and children whom we hadn’t met by emailing and calling incessantly. The final list was incredible, and we’d learned more new and amazing things about our guests than we ever could have imagined. For example, my grandmother told me that my eighty-year-old great-uncle started “going with” my great-aunt when he was eleven years old. They were both coming to our wedding. My great-uncle’s place card read, “Ask me about how I met my wife.” For my college roommate who had an unfortunate (but memorable) incident involving a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream and a cell phone dropped in a toilet: “Ask me about flushing my Nokia.” For my milky-skinned, blond friend who is 65 percent Cherokee, “Ask me about my tribe.”

  Awesome idea, right?

  Feel free to steal it.

  Leading up to the wedding, Dave and I scoured our memories for the most interesting details we could find about each of our guests. When we weren’t as close to some of the invitees, we asked our parents or mutual friends to fill in the blanks. It was a huge undertaking, but ultimately very rewarding.

  Unfortunately, until five days before my wedding, I didn’t realize that I actually needed to create these incredible place cards that had taken Dave and me months to plan.

  Aubrey was all over it. When she arrived in Seattle forty-eight hours before the wedding, she handed me a box of personalized place cards that matched the rest of our wedding stationery perfectly.

  Our entire suite of letterpressed wedding awesomeness included:

  Cocktail napkins

  Personalized book plates stuck inside the covers of our wedding favors, which were—surprise, surprise—autographed Susan Wiggs novels

  Wedding programs

  Invitations

  Place cards

  Thank-you notes

  Two different sizes of envelopes

  I should note, for posterity, that my dear Aubrey added decorative hand-stitching on the invitations, thank-you notes, book plates and wedding programs. Now that’s dedication.

  * * *

  CHEAT SHEET

  CARESSING CREAMY PAPER SAMPLES INSTEAD

  OF READING? HERE’S YOUR CHEAT SHEET:

  Work your connections. You’ve probably got a friend or two who can hook you up with some sweet deals for your Big Day.

  Your invitation sets the tone for the rest of the wedding. See if you can find a simple way to personalize it and get your guests excited about coming.

  Speaking of your guests, is there a way you can make each individual feel welcome and honored? Dave and I put a little personal detail on everyone’s place card—and I’ll bet you can top that. (Your choice of a mother-daughter wedding book does indicate a certain level of genius, after all.)

  * * *

  * * *

  SAVE-THE-DATES

  I’m not sure who came up with the idea of save-the-dates. You’ll eventually begin to refer to your save-the-dates as STDs, which is appropriate since they share many qualities with their namesake: you never think they’re going to happen to you, they keep cropping up at inopportune moments and they make you itch.

  Still, since Emily Post tells us we must send our wedding invitations between eight and twelve weeks prior to the wedding, it’s common courtesy to send a heads-up to guests a good six to eight months beforehand. Unlike our mothers’ weddings, your own Big Day will probably require extensive travel and planning for a large number of your guests. STDs are your way of saying, “Hey, mark this on your calendar and start looking at airfare—I’ll get back to you with the details later.”

  Early in our engagement, Dave saw a magnetic STD stuck to a friend’s refrigerator. I wanted him to feel as involved as possible in our wedding planning process, so whenever he came up with an idea I pounced on it. One of the gals in our team of wedding planners is a talented artist, and she used a portrait of Dave and me to create an attractive, fridge-worthy, 3-by-5 magnet. To this day, I see our STD adorning the freezer doors in the homes of all our loved ones, and I give Dave cosmic brownie points for his ingenious magnet idea.

  And don’t think for a minute that I haven’t made the “You’ve got my STD on your fridge!” joke about twenty times. Being married doesn’t mean I’m any more mature.

  * * *

  9

  RETAIL THERAPY

  Creating your registry, bridal showers, and your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get the Lamborghini of espresso machines

  ELIZABETH

  Ah, the wedding registry. This was easily my favorite part of the wedding planning journey. Picture the scene: You think about your life with your husband, all the family dinners to come, the lazy Saturday mornings spent in bed, the swanky cocktail parties you’ll host for your friends…and you pick out the objects that will populate those dreams. You drool over crystal candlesticks, paper-thin champagne flutes and espresso machines that mean you’ll never have to leave your home for a good latte. You convince your frugal, practical soul mate that, yes, you do need sterling silver butter knives and you can’t live without a $200 stainless steel Nambé candy bowl. So you make a list of all the things you want for your home. You put things on there that you would never dream of buying for yourself, because even though you just got a pay raise, you can’t see your way to spending four hundred bucks on a down comforter. But then, magically, all the stuff you asked for starts showing up on your doorstep.

  First, a note on having a registry at all: when we started to create ours, Dave hated the whole process. “It feels so acquisitiiiive,” he would whine as I pawed like a nesting hamster through Egyptian cotton bath towels. After stopping to look up the meaning of the word “acquisitive,” I sat him down and had a Big Talk. It went a little something like this:

  “Yes, having a wedding registry takes the surprise and fun out of the gifts we receive. But our guests will be getting us gifts, whether we register or not, so would you rather have eight potato peelers, or one peeler and sheets for our bed? Our guests will prefer being able to select something from a list, too, instead of hoping we like what they’ve chosen. Plus, do you REMEMBER the Beanie Baby collection that Cousin Perdinella* gave us for Christmas?”

  BAM! My little “We need a registry” speech worked like a charm.

  Uncle Ben, Spider-Man’s doomed father figure, said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Maybe he was talking about his nephew’s newly acquired spidey sense, but he could just as well have said that to a new bride. You see, as a bride, you’re now endowed with a mystical bridey power that attracts others to you, enticing them to throw you parties, compliment your figure and give you presents.

  However, you won’t hold onto this power for long if you take it for granted.

  The wedding registry is the most tangible place you’ll see this balance played out. As soon as you go live with your engagement—meaning that once you start to tell people about it—you’re going to begin receiving gifts. And as soon as you get your first, ahem, lame present (matching his and hers toilet doilies, anyone?), you’ll start your gift registry. Next thing you know, all the loot you pic
ked out and put on your list will begin to arrive in giant, bubble-wrapping-filled packages. Sounds good, right? It’s better than good—it’s totally flippin’ awesome!—until you mess up and forget to write a thank-you note. And, friends, nine out of ten of you will mess up.

  I always fancied myself a great thank-you note writer. I went as far as prewriting my thank-you notes, leaving two lines blank for personalization, before parties and job interviews. But I wasn’t ready for the flood of unexpected gifts that arrived on my doorstep following the engagement party my mom threw for us.

  Among the registry presents I received, there was a set of four place settings from my mom’s friend, Venita, who also happened to be the wife of my high school principal. Given her elevated status in my life, you’d think that I would have written a perfectly ruled, gushingly thankful note—especially considering that until we got her gift, Dave and I ate our meals off plastic plates. Additionally, we had just moved to Chicago and Venita was one of the few people to realize that it would be much more convenient for us if she sent our gift ahead to our new address so that we didn’t have to move it across the country.

  She was pretty much the best, most generous gifter we had come across yet.

  And it’s not like I didn’t think about writing a thank-you note. Every week or so, I would realize that I still hadn’t sent one and would mentally castigate myself for my rudeness…and then I would go make a bag of microwave popcorn and spend two hours watching The Real Housewives of Orange County.