My Wedding, My Way
Many couples add personal touches to their wedding, displaying baby photos or detailing their love story on programs or decor, but what about personalizing a wedding for guests?
While, sure, it’s all about the newlyweds on the big day, it can also be nice to remind guests that there’s plenty of hooplah for them, too.
When my husband and I planned our weddingr, I really wanted to show guests that we weren’t just celebrating us – we were celebrating our love in front of everyone that we loved as well.
Even though I had high hopes for other details and things I wanted to do during the wedding (when we thanked guests for coming during a little reception speech I really wanted to thank everyone for their part in molding my husband and I into the people we’ve become today), here are three things I did manage to do to personalize our wedding for our guests.
1. Decorated each table with pictures of the guests seated there.
You know how a lot of couples decorate their guests’ tables with pictures of themselves at that age? (Billy at age 1 and Lucy at age 1 for table one, etc.) I can’t remember where I got the idea, but somewhere along the way I thought it would be really cool if, instead, tables were decorated with photos of the people sitting at them. Since most couples divide guests up into tables of certain groups – this side of the family, that side of the family, his high school friends, her childhood friends, his work buddies and so on, this wasn’t actually that hard to do. I tried my best to include everyone in pictures on the tables, sometimes putting in an extra frame for say, a table of both high school friends and co-workers, but of course, I wasn’t able to get every single person (like dates or plus ones).
This little detail was probably the one I heard the most feedback about, especially as family helped set up the tables. “Can you believe that? She has pictures of everyone that’s going to be at the tables – gosh, I can’t believe all that work!” is one thing I remember hearing from my husband’s aunt, to which he agreed, pointing to me and mouthing “all her.”
2. Highlighted friends and family in our wedding slideshow.
I already knew I wanted to do a photo slideshow to present during our reception, and thought it would be special to include photos of everyone at our wedding. So I dug into the archives (both Facebook and old-school photo albums) and tried to include photos of as many people as possible. So along with all the baby pictures and awkward teenager photos of my husband and me, I was able to include photos of just about everyone else – again just aside from people I hadn’t met, like dates of guests.
3. Gathered song requests from as many guests as possible.
I loved that one of my friends included a “please tell us a song that gets you moving” line to their RSVPs, but didn’t have room to include that on our (very traditionally Chinese) wedding invites (we also just did online RSVPs to save money). Instead, I reached out to as many friends and family as possible to ask for a song they’d like to hear. While DJs often take song requests at the reception, this way I knew there’d be something already included on our song list that would appeal to more than just my husband and me.
In the end, I loved how all my little details to personalize our wedding worked out. Nothing cost us anything extra to do – aside from a little extra time.