Heck yeah. One of the most fun weddings I've been to was in leaf season at a New England ski resort. The old people spent Saturday morning driving around or spa-ing, the young people spent it mountain biking and such. Then, party.
Weddings: more fun than suicide threads.
My cousin's wedding was pretty fun, but in the same way that all our big family gatherings are. Of course, I skipped the ceremony and just went to the reception, so that might have something to do with it.
Oh hell yes. Most of the non-family weddings I've been to were fun, especially the first round of post-college college-friend weddings, when they'd stick all the single people together at a table for the reception dinner, and I'd know some of them but not all of them. It's like being at a bar, only outside (usually), and the drinks are free, and there are grammas and children around doing the chicken dance. Met one of my very best friends at the wedding of a common friend who neither of us ever talk to anymore.
Best fun wedding innovation ever: cocktails before the ceremony. It was a gay wedding, natch.
The best most of us could come up with was a list of weddings that weren't bad, per se, but that were easily beaten on the fun-meter by a good house party or a night out at a bar.
I wouldn't like to go to a wedding that could be described as "like a house party, but more fun".
Weddings are supposed to be enjoyed, but not in a fun way.
First, I'm not sure "fun" of the sort that's the aim of a house party is really the aim of a wedding. But I've been to weddings that I enjoyed a lot, sure.
Weddings are supposed to be enjoyed, but not in a fun way.
The hell?
The set of "fun weddings" is exactly the set of "weddings with an open bar." Someone should get on their Venn-Diagram Horse here.
Fun weddings predominate in my experience. Rare are those that aren't fun. You're going to a party with lots of people who are relatively close friends of your relatively close friends. I'm fairly surprised that isn't your experience, but it's possible that you have a more fun (or even m-fun) general life that makes it harder for weddings to stand out.
Okay, so we're talking about receptions here, not actual weddings. Never mind me.
The last wedding I attended was pretty decent. A hippy judge officiated, there were cupcakes, and the whole thing was only about 45 minutes beginning to end.
The one before that was more traditional -- Catholic ceremony, reception at a fancy club, after-party at a house out in the country. But it certainly didn't come close to the fun I've had going out to the bar with 5 or 6 close friends on many, many occasions.
A male friend recently attended his relative's big, no-expense-spared wedding, which included men's and women's "fun" days before the day of. Since the men were just going golfing, my friend went on the women's outing, to a fancy day spa, and got the works. He thought it was quite the time.
Does a "fun wedding" have to include an incident of sofa-off-the-roof-throwing? If so I have not been to any. If the definition of fun is a wee bit broader then yes, I have been to some, including my own.
You mean the wedding? Or the reception? Catholic weddings are pretty solemn, and it's like going to Church except two people get married in the middle. I wouldn't say they're m-fun, or fun, but they're twenty minutes to an hour out of your life.
But the receptions? Someone else pays for your drinks and there's dancing and food. The only weddings I've been to that weren't fun violated the rule of Cana: look, Jesus turned the water into wine, peeps. Precedent.
The correct answer is: "Hells Yes"
I've been to lots of fun weddings. The Lesbian Wedding four years ago was fun - the bride-I-didn't-know's dad brought a handle of tequila we finished the night before. The wedding last summer in Miami was a lot of fun, helped by the fact that we had the bachelor/bachelorette parties the Saturday night before.
The wedding I was at this past weekend in DC was the second in a group of friends from grad school, and both those wedding were a lot of fun - more like hanging out at a bar (with free booze!) with a good group of friends than a wedding. At both of these weddings, the "house band" from our days in grad school (and which the grooms were members of) played the rehearsal dinner.
Well, it has been previously addressed in this space that different people have different concepts of fun, and the most boring wedding I've ever been to must have been fun for the bride's family.
But my wedding was fun for everyone. Even the 13-year-old male cousins.
I had a fun wedding, or so everyone said. It was a couple years of college, and we invited our best college friends, all of whom had to travel--so we arranged for hotel rooms in a hotel right across the street from our apartment building, arranged a few events (dinner, a picnic at the art museum on a day they had a jazz band playing, dinner at our place) for a few days ahead of the wedding, and the wedding itself was basically an evening thing followed by a cocktail party with a jazz pianist in the furnished penthouse of the building we lived in. Easy and super.
It's certainly possible to have lots of fun at a wedding -- unless the guest list is very small, it's probably going to be too heterogenous (elderly great-aunts, 11-year-old cousins, old friends who don't know anyone else) for the wedding reception as a whole to be something you'd call a fun party.
My college coop had a wedding a year or so after I moved out that was pretty great -- an alum who still hung aroung all the time married a woman who lived in the house when I was there. They rented the Boston Aquarium (which is a very cool space), and threw a party that was both sort of grown-up glamorous from my 19 year-old perspective and a lot of fun. But that worked because there were a whole lot of at least vaguely acquainted guests in a young single age group.
The marriage didn't work out, which was sad -- while I wasn't terribly close to either of them, I thought they were both really great people.
I'd say fun weddings are more the norm than the exception, but of course I rarely have to go to weddings for business/obligatory reasons. Like SCMT says, it's hanging out with friends (and often a good excuse to bring together people who live far apart).
One of the more fun weddings I attended was a clapping-cheering-chanting-swaying, dance-in-the-parking-lot-on-the-way-to-the-reception traditional Kenyan/American evangelical ceremony.
Way more than alcohol, I think music is key. A great band can make a good wedding fantastic. And the right music during the ceremony can be deeply moving.
I've been to a number of fun weddings, and plenty of not so fun ones. They all run the gamut, though pseudo-family weddings are generally less fun than friends celebrations.
That said, being in the midst of planning my own nuptials gives me a different perspective on things: I don't care if anyone else has fun at my wedding, as long as I have an awesome time. (Lucky for the guests, my music choices are subject to clearance by the bride-to-be).
Someone should get on their Venn-Diagram Horse here.
I'd like to get married on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Better than getting married on your way off the Golden Gate Bridge...
unless the guest list is very small, it's probably going to be too heterogenous (elderly great-aunts, 11-year-old cousins, old friends who don't know anyone else) for the wedding reception as a whole to be something you'd call a fun party.
Nah. We didn't have any kids there--no one had them yet--but we did have elderly people and young people and people who didn't know each other--just, there were enough elderly people that they could all sit together on the comfy seating and chat, while the younger people hung out by the bar, and everyone at least knew a couple of other people there.
My wedding was super fun. After the ceremony, the photographer took a really long time to do family pictures, and people got antsy for the reception to start properly. Just as we were about to start, the power blew. While the dad worked frantically at the fusebox in my in-laws' garage, I had my bridezilla moment: I went to the band leader and yelled, "Get the snare drum and the accordion on the dance floor and start the hora!" It snapped the party into action. My father-in-law finally got the power back on just as the hora was winding down, and he was forever after sad that he missed being lifted up in a chair. All my in-laws (non-Jews) wanted Jewish weddings after that, although none followed through.
Later on, the band went home but left their P.A. for me to play dance mixes through. The cops came and we moved the party indoors. My friends, instructed to clear a dance floor, said, "but there's people sleeping on the couches in there." My father-in-law bellowed, "Not tonight they're not!"
It occurred to me that, once the paperwork's done, it might be fun to have a divorce reception. I'd probably have to clear it with my girlfriend, though.
Part of the reason I'm not thinking 'fun' is that IMLimitedWeddingRelatedE, guest lists are usually dominated by family, rather than friends. So either you're at a wedding with all of your parents' cousins and your first and second cousins, who in my case are less than fascinating, or you're one of a few friends feeling as though you've been dropped in the middle of someone else's Thanksgiving dinner.
I've only been to one wedding - not counting a couple of relatives' weddings when I was 6 - and I was the only person there in my age range who was single.
I'm going to seven weddings over the next eight weekends. I'll make an empirical study -- careful notes and graphs, and then I'll report back here at the end, if I'm still alive.
I've only been to one wedding in my life and only then as a date (though I knew the couple). You know, I'm 27, and not only am I attending no weddings this year (or next?) but virtually none of my friends are in the position to be married, so far as I can tell. Which is only really odd to me because weddings seem to be such a factor in everyone else's life these days.
I want to learn the hora. Wrongshore, have a divorce reception, and invite me.
26: Yeah, the family-dominated wedding isn't so fun. Inviting cousins should be against the rules, unless you're actually friends as well as relatives.
I will have been to a fun wedding in a bit, by hook or by crook.
Inviting cousins should be against the rules, unless you're actually friends as well as relatives.
Someone tell this to my mom.
I went to a terribly fun wedding of a college friend in Pittsburgh a few years ago. I was afraid it was going to be hypertraditional, and a lot of it was--service in a cathedral with a homily about making lots of babies, etc.--but the reception was ridiculously fun.
I had warned Max that there would probably be this one guy there whom the bride had once set me up with, which had disastrous results, and that I was really nervous about seeing him again. Of course, the bride sat us next to each other at the table, so there was no avoiding him. Everything at the reception started out slow and nervous, but at some point, the dude asked me some really olive-branchy question about Pynchon and we became fast friends.
There was an open bar, lots of ridiculous dancing, and good laughs. The groom kept pulling everyone aside individually to do shots of sambuca. After the reception, there was a party in the hotel hosted by the groom's parents, and in the morning, a very hungover, but pleasant breakfast.
Max experienced the wedding as the end of his romanticization with the bourgeoisie. Working-class people really know how to have a good time.
virtually none of my friends are in the position to be married
You live in the wrong city.
35 seems to contradict 34.
That said, sure: give me your mom's email address.
37 -- I had the same reaction to 34-5. What goes on? Is he to lose his bachelorhood before his cherry?
Wedding was great, and I imagine the open bar -- wait, the Top Shelf open bar per the sensibilities of he-who-paid-the-bill -- helped quite a bit.
The marriage itself, less fun. Probably not enough top shelf liquor.
When my first wife and I got married, we held the wedding in my parents' front yard, with about 20-30 family/friends in attendance. It was officiated by a friend of hers who was a Zen Buddhist priest. The reception was also in the front yard and featured corn on the cob, watermelon, barbequed chicken etc.
The marriage did not work out great in the end, but the wedding was fun.
Yeah, the family-dominated wedding isn't so fun.
Isn't that the vast majority of weddings? It's the only kind I've ever been to.
I remember when I was a kid going to a fun wedding that was held in a park by hippies. There was a maypole.
When my first wife and I got married, we held the wedding in my parents' front yard, with about 20-30 family/friends in attendance. It was officiated by a friend of hers who was a Zen Buddhist priest. The reception was also in the front yard and featured corn on the cob, watermelon, barbequed chicken etc.
The marriage did not work out great in the end, but the wedding was fun.
Hmm. I'm seeing a correlation here between fund weddings and failed marriages...
I thought my wedding was a blast. Open bar, good music, dancing, great food, a large group of friends on top of family (both the wife and I have small extended families that live thousands of miles away, definitely altering the balance).
Next: fun suicides at weddings.
50 -- not to worry -- your wedding was "fun", not "fund".
I don't actually know if my wedding was fun -- I was completely spaced out for most of it. It was afternoon-cocktail partyish, with no music and no dancing, but plenty to drink (homebrewed mead, which went a lot faster than the regular wine, beer, and liquor). I had a good time, but I don't know if the guests would describe it as a 'fun party'.
w-lfs-n: gnomic on weddings. Gnomic on everything.
Jackmormon, if the divorce reception works out, we'd be doing the hora clockwise; usually it is performed counter-clockwise. Bear that in mind. Also, I could probably teach you the hora without leaving the comments section.
Most of the weddings I've been to have been of the medium fun, heterogeneous crowd type. The next one I'm going to is a "destination" wedding for my very best childhood friend, and I'm bitter about it. Of course I'm going and not whining directly to her because she's practically my sister, but I hate the idea of bride-mandated vacations. If I ever get married, I'll get a friend to internet ordain themselves and do the ceremony, there will be a kickball game (maybe softball) to determine the last name of the married couple, and there will be a lot of beer.
Destination weddings are great. You're forcing people to travel anyway; might as well make them travel somewhere more interesting than Mom's house in the St. Louis suburbs.
I know the hora involves joining arms at the elbow and kicking every once in a while. What's the beat-scheme? 4/4?
36: Odd, they seem pretty surly most of the time.
I was the witness at the courthouse for my best friend's first marriage, which ended in divorce. So when he had me do the same thing second time around, he and his new wife and I joked about how I wouldn't fuck up again. They just split up. Oopsie!
57: you've got a point. Still, if it were at Mom's house in upstate NY, I wouldn't have to rent a car, or get a cottage or whatever the hell I'm going to have to do for this, or otherwise spend money on what I could allot to a vacation someplace I wanted to go.
They weren't joking, you insensitive clod.
Even the 13-year-old male cousins
I can't think of many weddings that would have been enjoyable for me (when I was a 13-year-old boy). I mean, handjobs from the attractive, single, bridesmaids are not what people mean when they say "party favors."
My wedding was fun.
This was our wedding cake.
50 -- Oops, missed your description of your own fun wedding. Also, Idealist's double-post may have skewed my perception of the frequency of the fun wedding/failed marriage correlation. I'm sure your marriage will be just fine...
Yeah, I think the only fun weddings are ones you attend without feeling you're participating in a giant vanity project for the couple.
"handjobs from the bridesmaids" would be an awesome replacement custom for "tossing the bouquet".
Hora is 4/4, grapevine step in a circle, hands joined or arms linked. (Start with right foot, left foot in front, right foot, left foot behind, repeat.) That's about it.
Variations include: breaking off a smaller circle inside the first circle; lifting the bride, groom, and other important members of the wedding party up in a chair and dancing them around the middle of the circle, often with the bride and groom holding the same napkin from their chairs; getting all the men in a smaller circle and having them giving advice to the groom; and my friend Dave taking off his shoes, a risky venture given all the clad feet moving rapidly around the room.
Other Israeli folk dances include everybody running into the middle of the circle and back out, or the Yemenite step, which is like a grapevine but has a cute little pivot. But the hora is very, very simple.
"handjobs from the bridesmaids" would be an awesome replacement custom for "tossing the bouquet".
Well, it's already a very good euphemism.
Speaking of kickball and softball, one of the best things about my sister's wedding (besides the pinata) was the touch-football game in the park the day before.
68 -- what about that one where you have your arms crossed or akimbo and you kick your legs out?
I think my wedding was fun. People said it was. I had SO MUCH FUN! But I think mostly the people who had fun were our family & our close friends--work friends thought it was nice, but our old friends really seemed to love it and have a great time.
We had the ceremony & reception in the same space, a converted warehouse that had beautiful wood floors and ceilings. Very shabby chic. The ceremony itself was in the round (well, people were on three sides), and people were really close and could hear everything. My brother performed most of the ceremony, and our closest friends all did key roles. We kind of did a Catholic-Jewish fusion wedding, without clergy.
We had a really good band. The trumpeter in it won at the Apollo--and he's white!!! By the end of the night my dad (who is tone deaf) was onstage with his buddies, singing their high school anthem in French. And people were clapping.
I have pictures...do you wanna see pictures??? My mom wants to show you pictures!!!
The hora is just a grapevine step? Ok, I have to admit that that's something of a let-down.
71.--I think that's Russian. It's also incredibly difficult.
72 -- showing us pictures might interfere with your anonymity.
I thought there was a more complicated step but no one did it? The chair thing is very popular.
and I think most weddings are fun, esp. family ones & ones that serve as reunions for groups of friends. I actually like my extended family...
I love the Israelis and their quaint native dances. Some of their folk art is quite nice too.
My college roommate's wedding was a blast -- he had it on his mom's spread, a big old de-commune-ized hippie commune up in Maine, and it was in part a chance to see a bunch of my friends from college. Plus skinny-dipping in a lake, blueberry picking, and a party mit giant bonfire (and lobster for the non-vegetarians) the night before.
I went to a great wedding a few years ago. A week's worth of parties and dinners leading up to it, ceremony at the National Cathedral, fabulous reception with great booze, great food, and a dance band that had played at one of Clinton's inaugurals. I have no idea how much the whole thing cost, but it was really fun, and I even met a guy I ended up dating for a while.
The happy couple decided to divorce eight months later.
Right now I'm planning the music for two friends' wedding that's coming up in June. There will be enough Prince to make sure everyone has a good time; there may even be so much that actual fucking occurs on the dance floor.
71--It's like the kzatchka or something.
There are probably little kicks and stuff, but the idea of the hora is to get everyone involved, so the simpler the dance, the more fun. It's also a good way to get people onto the dance floor, which is why it's a good idea to segue from it into a little dance-party action instead of sitting everyone back down for the bride and groom's dance.
I was very particular about the dancing at my wedding. I picked one fight with the bride and her mom, and it was over dance floor placement. I knew it had to be in the center of the table rather than at one end, so as to be a focal point.
DaveB, be sure to include my favorite song. "It's getting hot in here/ So take off all your clothes!"
80.3: Warn them, DaveB, that any Prince-inspired dance-floor fucking universally leads to the conception of beautiful, multi-racial future babies.
On the wedding/marriage correlation, I think that my wife and I were much earlier settled on the idea of having a wedding than on having a marriage. We certainly thought through the former better than the latter.
Admittedly, such babies will also have a tendency to be unfortunately bespangled as a result of the prenatal Prince influence, but there's a downside to everything.
I think people had fun at ours; lots of pictures suggest so. Like LB, I appear to have been in an altered state. Asked about the food afterwards, I realized I had eaten without tasting it. My wife's college roomate convinced her boyfriend to get married on the evidence of our wedding, so it must have been ok.
On the other hand, my car wouldn't start from the hotel parking lot the next morning. Ground strap corrosion, my brother and I decided pretty quickly. A jumper cable ground got us on our way. Weddings set the tone for marriages.
Anyone been to disastrous weddings?
What about these babies is not to like?
87: Many Mormon ones -- where nobody drank.
88 -- their fashion sense.
So for those of you who had/went to fun weddings, what exactly about it made it fun, besides free-flowing liquor?
The bf and I were talking about this the other day and came to a tentative conclusion that there's a roughly inverse correlation between the expense/formality of a wedding and its fun factor. Hewing to the demands of the Wedding Industrial Complex tends to be associated with a very weighty, stressful form of perfectionism that sucks all the joy out of the room.
We saw a bit of this in action last summer, where there were two weddings on the same day for the same couple: one a traditional Indian wedding and one a country-club American wedding. The Indian ceremony was fascinating to watch, and the reception (in the yard of a relative, with rafts of homecooked food) was relaxed and fun. The American wedding seemed a bit tense and rushed in comparison, and people didn't mix at the reception nearly as well. (There were two separate but overlapping groups of invitees.)
When selecting a site for an outdoor wedding, please consider the time of day and the season when the wedding is occurring, not when you're looking at it. Being eaten alive by mosquitos during the ceremony was only partly made up for by the fact that we could rush inside for the reception afterwards.
Most of my friends are atheists, so they might have been surprised by the hour-plus sung Latin Mass. Still, the music was great, and the totally cool priest drafted his homily with everyone including the heathen in mind. The reception was pretty much like LB's, by the sound of things, but if there were people not having fun, we didn't hear about it.
Mormon Alcohol-free weddings generally suck.
87: I went to a weird one once, as a female friend's 'date' -- she hadn't been in touch with the groom for ten years, and didn't expect to know anyone else there. Talking with the other people at our table, no one seemed to know him currently. It was kind of bizarre, as if he had no friends at all, and had invited people as props, to fill out what an expensive wedding should look like.
We did dance the hora, though.
I've been to a couple of alcohol-flowing weddings at which I didn't have much fun. One of them was kind of ruined by a giant photograph-taking setpiece: "okay, now you have to come and get in position, not you, it's not your turn, okay, face front, wait, now there's another group..." One of them was just kind of boring; maybe I was in a bad mood.
87: I sang in the wedding of my choir TA from high school. She'd written lots of popped-up versions of old hymns for us to sing. They were terrible. Everyone in the wedding party had a song they were supposed to sing, all written by the bride. Not disastrous, but the biggest jerk-off of the bride I've ever seen.
Most weddings I've been to have been only somewhat fun, partly because they were stolid affairs all the way through to the reception. Teetotaling primitivist Protestants are worthless when it comes to parties. It's also not fun to go to a wedding you don't want to goto, as I did once because I didn't know better than to say no to the woman who asked. It was her sister, see, and she was taking me as her date, which I was apparently too dense to understand...
LB's 54 is about what I remember of my own wedding--I was exhausted--but others said it was both fun and surprising, especially when the minister and his assistant pulled out long knives and said, "Bring the lamb to the slaughter!"--meaning me. My wife and I had our hands coated in limestone and water, and we were thereby cemented for all of geologic time. That was the most planned part of the day, however, and the dinner afterwards at a German restaurant in St. Louis was mostly awkward.
The first wedding I ever went to was disastrous. Not the actaul affair, though. After the reception, the groom skipped town and was never seen again. While it sounds dramatic, it was actaully more white trash. This is the kind of thing that happens where I'm from.
The bf and I were talking about this the other day and came to a tentative conclusion that there's a roughly inverse correlation between the expense/formality of a wedding and its fun factor.
It's not the expense as much as the affordability, I suspect. Fun weddings are really just fun parties. Throw a party you'd enjoy, with minor concession, as necessary, to parents.
I told the story about the wedding where I accidentally showed up basically naked, right? (Borrowed dress, gauzy black, looked opaque when I put it on indoors, became completely transparent in the horizontal sunset light at the wedding.) But that was a fun wedding for most people, just not for me as I skulked around trying to hide behind pillars.
I am going to be the maid of honor in an alcohol-free quasi-Buddhist wedding with karaoke next month.
I am going to be the maid of honor in an alcohol-free quasi-Buddhist wedding with karaoke next month.
Isn't that a human rights violation?
I hear that fisting makes for a great wedding party.
104: I'll get back to you on that after the alcohol free karaoke (but not Buddhist) bachelorette party.
I've never even heard of alcohol free karaoke. I thought there was a strictly enforced three-drink absolute minimum.
This was a disastrous wedding. Good movie, though.
101 is right on. We threw an expensive party, not necessarily an expensive wedding, but we wanted to throw the best party we could and we did.
I'm not sure which elements were reproducible. A lot of it came from having pretty mellow family members on both sides who wanted to drink and dance, a rare blessing. Even more came from some good alchemy between friends from different parts of our lives.
Some of the details we were particular about:
--Seating. Always have place cards; if you "don't want to tell people where to go" you end up creating the first day of the high school cafeteria, where some people have nowhere to go. We ended up doing assigned seats, which was maniacal, but allowed us to have fun being puppet masters. Not necessary.
--Dancing. Having the dance floor in the middle puts everyone within view of fun. Not everyone wants to dance the whole time, but if the people who want to can, then the people who don't want to will either enjoy watching them or feel like they're getting away with something. Also, we arranged to have the band a) let my band borrow their instruments and b) leave their PA so we could carry on with mix CDs. Including ample Justin Timberlake.
--Setting. Holding it in a family member's back yard cut down on expense and allowed us to keep going into the night.
--Hotel. We encouraged as many people as possible to stay in the same place, so the party raged on and people got to know one another.
--Pimp. Our officiant, we found out a month before the wedding, had been arrested for working at a "massage parlor". We sat him with family friends from the same city where the offense occurred, leading to a lot of "you look familiar" fun.
You'll never make Modern Bride without a pimp, Cala.
We had fun. Twice. The advice above is sound: ignore the WIC, and arrange a fun party. Nobody cares if the Jordan almonds match the bride's hair-ribbons.
CharleyCarp cares nothing for women, infants and children.
Best wedding in my family: the bride's father and the groom's mother, both widowed, met at the rehearsal, hit it off and married each other a few years later. Sadly, this has led to decades of incest jokes.
That is hilarious, irregular. It's not actually disturbing, but it seems like it should be. At least there can't be arguments about whose in-laws are more annoying to visit!
a tentative conclusion that there's a roughly inverse correlation between the expense/formality of a wedding and its fun factor.
Yes, this. A fun wedding is a celebration and a bad wedding is a display. A fun wedding says "we're doing this because we want to," a bad wedding tacks "impress someone" onto the end of that same phrase.
I've been to some incredibly fun weddings, including one where the bride and groom (I was a bridesman) invited the wedding party to come out to Vegas and stay in a different hotel for the 2nd half of their honeymoon for a long weekend of after-partying. That was pretty awesome.
Also, I've officiated a couple of weddings: both fun, though a friend said that my Presbyterian ancestry was showing in the service I wrote for one of them. I rode the "recognizing and creating and strengthening ties to community and family and friends" thing pretty hard rather than the God thing.
102 pretty much kills LB's claim that she's dowdy.
Nobody officiated my wedding. I guess that's weird, but I think doing it any other way would've been weirder.
Factors for a fun wedding, in my faded memory: (1) fun guests; (2) fun music -- not necessarily "good" music, but make a couple for standbys for each generation; (3) a space where people can move around; and (4) a carefree attitude -- if the bride and groom are freaking out about, well, any stupid detail, no one will have fun.
I tell my parents I'm not getting married until the gays can. This puts their Baptist brains into an extraordinary tizzy.
I'm just catching up, but I can't let this pass without comment:
my [male] friend went on the women's outing, to a fancy day spa
Instead of golf? The pillars of our civilization weaken yet again.
I've been to tons of fun weddings, and they've been at various points along the price ladder. I reject the idea that expensive weddings can't be fun.
Here, in my opinion, are the prerequisites:
1. Alcohol!
Actually, this should be numbers one through about eight. You've got a big party that probably includes at least three distinct groups of people -- bride's family, groom's family, friends of b&g -- that haven't previously mixed very much. You need to knock people's social inhibitions down about five notches before the party is going to be anything other than awkward. I suppose that if you're particularly socially progressive, you could break down those social barriers in other ways (compulsory nudity? aerosol hallucinogens?), but alcohol is the old faithful.
And I don't mean a little alcohol. I mean that you should aim towards everyone has at least two drinks before dinner, two drinks with dinner, and two drinks after dinner. The before-dinner drinks are particularly crucial -- on an empty stomach, they'll hit harder and people might open up with the people at their table.
2. Friends!
You want to invite a serious core of people who have fun in the same way that you do. Not just, like, four or five of your closest friends. Aim to have at least a dozen or so people whom you've partied with before and enjoyed hanging out with. People are sheep. Your first cousin once removed Bob ain't going to start busting moves until he sees that your friends are making it okay.
3. Seating Arrangements
You are like a tiny little god in seating people with each other, so make the most of it. Force at least a little bit of crossover between the fun people and the questionably fun people. If you're seating people in groups of eight, consider the following possibility: each table of eight is two groups of four -- each group of four knows and likes each other, but doesn't know the other group of four. That way, if the cross-pollination works, great, but if not, they can just subdivide into their groups and still be having an okay time.
Also, avoid isolating the wedding party. You and possibly your bridesmaids/groomsmen are the people who know the most people at the party. You should be out there seeding the ground for after-dinner fun, not stuck up on display.
4. Avoid Family Awkwardness
Ruthlessly cut out any traditions which will highlight family tensions. Use your seating powers to seperate familymembers who don't get along. Don't invite everyone who shares a single gene with you -- freeze out familymembers who are assholes, or, more sneakily, find ways to invite them and ensure that they can't come for locale/timing reasons.
5. Don't Be A Psycho
Avoid being a bridezilla or a groom who has pissed off his bride by abdicating all responsibility for the wedding. Give yourself room to breathe in the week before the wedding. People will be a lot happier and more prone to have fun if you're happy and having fun. Do not have the bachelor/ette parties right before the wedding, and as such do not be hung over at the wedding. Get some sleep. Don't sweat the inevitable screw-ups. When the inevitable screw-ups happen, delegate responsibility to members of your wedding party (NOT your family) and get on with enjoying your wedding.
Three definitely fun weddings, in my experience:
1) Mine. My wife's family has a property on Lake Winnipesaukee, so we had the ceremony right there on the shore of the lake. Our 4 siblings held the poles of the chuppah, and our best man and maid of honor froze their asses off in the surprisingly chilly wind. Still, it was a fun ceremony, helped along by the light-hearted mood my wife and I (and our rabbi) helped to set. The reception was in the function hall of a golf course up in the area -- a hall which a big ol' converted barn called, since it has a bar in it, the Bar-N. Aw, yeah. We had assigned seating, but people mingled enough to have fun, and copious dancing (to a mix we essentially handed our DJ). And an epic nearly-whole-wedding hora. I might even have pictures of it...
Oh! And an open bar.
2) Very good friends from college, at a lovely venue I can't remember the name of in Chicago. Short, very meaningful ceremony, kick-ass reception with a big band which at one point backed the groom who sang a song he'd written for his new bride. Great couple, great party. And open bar. And a hora.
3) Wedding ceremony held in a UU church in Lexington, and reception at Fenway Park, in the State Street Pavilion. We had the whole park to ourselves, the happy couple was up on the scoreboard, the food was incredible, and Wally the Green Monster showed up. Also an open bar, and also a hora.
So, that's definitive. Good couple + open bar + hora = great wedding.
On preview, I see that Epoch has done a better job of systematizing things, although s/he left out the hora.
I'll agree strongly with 127.2: one thing that made the first two weddings in my list great was the appropriate family:friend ratio.
on Lake Winnipesaukee
Let me guess, your wedding took place on Groundhog Day.
My brother's wedding was pretty fun.
Fun facts: the bride has been going to church forever; my brother did the bare minimum to get the Catholic wedding. The priest-- the gayest priest I've ever met, which is saying a lot-- spent half the...is it homily?...on how handsome my brother is. "Such a great smile! To die for! And [bride's name] is nice too." Then he sang that singy bit just like Morrissey. Later, the priest got it on with SCMTim.
The day was sort of spoiled by the fact that i had to spend it on a "party bus" getting pictures taken. Would have been fun except no food, nothing but beer.
Epoch's rules are pretty good. I'd add, don't bother to have a fucking bachelor/bachelorette party. I mean, fine; go out with your good friends in the week before the wedding, just because. But for god's sake avoid setting up anything appalling or secretive. Weddings aren't excuses to be assholes.
I've never danced a hora, as I said above, but I did attend an awesome wedding that featured a giant, multi-generational Electric Slide, which of course is basically the Hustle.
129: One of the fun weddings I went to had an awesome hora. Another might have -- I was pretty drunk and it was a long time ago. I haven't been to a ton of Jewish weddings. But yeah! Social dancing = fun.
131 is way teh awesome. It also recalls another rule which is, for god's sake, no matter how busy you are the day/hours before the wedding, make sure you've scheduled in twenty minutes to eat something.
One of my best friends worked as a producer on "Bridezilla." She said that the number one mistake people made was renting a too-expensive place and cutting costs by only reserving it for a short time. As soon as the party really gets going, everybody has to leave.
Aim to have at least a dozen or so people whom you've partied with before and enjoyed hanging out with.
At the time I get married, probably everyone who fits this description will be someone I haven't seen in 3 to 5 years.
This means I have to make sure to stay in touch, so the wedding invitation won't be a complete shock.
Also, I can't belive so many people think it's universally normal for people at a wedding reception to be drunk. That has not been encouraged at all at the...um...six weddings I've been to. Maybe because they were all family-heavy.
Unless they're *really* the right kind of friends. I have a friend who did that to most of his wedding guest friends--many didn't even know he was dating when the invitation arrived.
Luckily we all know that he's just like that, and were able to amuse ourselves in the days leading up to the wedding (and at the wedding reception itself) bitching about it.
138: Not falling down drunk, but definitely over the legal limit. The weddings I went to that were dry? No one danced, and everyone went left early.
No one danced, and everyone went left early.
Yes, that sounds normal.
That sounds like hell. That's pretty much all I wanted out of my wedding: people dancing and having fun. Now we're well into insanity territory, but a wedding where everyone just sat around at the reception and left by 8pm would make me cry.
140: Exactly. The lamest wedding I've ever been to had no alcohol, not enough food, and no dancing. And, if I recall correctly, no forks. That was weird.
Let's see...I wouldn't say no one danced, but most people didn't dance. Especially when the entertainment is a bluegrass band...only people who know how to dance to a bluegrass band can dance.
And the concept of "left early" shouldn't even apply...the place was rented until the end of the day, and people left at different times, as expected.
144: Wait, no, I'm wrong. It was no knives. I remember vividly sitting on a staircase (no chairs!) and trying to cut my prime rib with a spoon.
Nobody danced at my wedding, b/c I'm not really a "dancing at formal events" type of person. Dancing's fun, but not everything that's fun requires dancing. I think though that if kids are invited, there should be dancing.
not everything that's fun requires dancing
Blasphemy!
I''ll just ban myself on the way out.
trying to cut my prime rib with a spoon.
Why a spoon, cousin? Why not an axe?
Because it's dull, you twit, it'll hurt more.
147: That's definitely true. What made the wedding sad was that there was an expectation that there would be dancing: a DJ, a dance floor, but with no alcohol and no good music, no one danced.
My brother's wedding was great, the ceremony more so than the reception - not that the reception was bad, but my main memories of it are of breastfeeding a 4 month old and eating cake. The cake was beautiful, it was a model of a large hedge maze, with figures of the bride and groom about to enter.
The invitations asked everyone to bring a small percussion instrument; the bride came in to "Lovely Rita"; there were three readings - two were extracts from letters between the bride and groom, one (mine) was an article of my choice from one of that morning's papers (thanks bro); the best man was in Greek national dress (he's not Greek, although the bride is), and whilst they were doing all the official signing register bits my dad led everyone in a rousing rendition of the Philosophers' Song, accompanied by their percussion instruments.
Anyway, they've split up now.
Went to a good reception in February - ceremony was pretty standard, but they had a ceilidh band and caller at the reception. All the bride's friends (mostly home educating families with loads of kids and a distinct lack of inhibitions) danced wildly, while the groom's friends sat and frowned at us.
Good weddings have short ceremonies, an open bar, and 1980s music. That's really all there is.
For the wedding where I was a bridesman, it's worth noting, the string quartet doing the music for the ceremony were cajoled into learning the Imperial March so that the groom and his party could march in to it. Stormtrooper outfits were not used, just lovely tuxedos. The younger half of those in attendance burst into riotous laughter and I am completely sincere when I say that set the perfect mood for the rest of the wedding.
Oh, the second weirdest family wedding I went to: my cousin married a heavy metal dude. Her side: all prim midwestern Protestants. His side: lots of leather, hair, and shout-outs during the ceremony. I did my best to signal that I was not as appalled as my aunts.
I went to a wedding where the bride and groom entered to that "Let's Get Ready To Rumble" song doing fake-boxing warmups. I wanted to weep.
With joy or with sorrow? I think I'd laugh my fool head off.
the string quartet doing the music for the ceremony were cajoled into learning the Imperial March
Excellent. I attended a wedding at which the groom came down the aisle to the Star Wars theme played on the bagpipes.
All these silly things seem like they would be disrespectful to the old, religious and tradition-minded people present. I always thought the wedding should be solemn and respectable, and then the reception following the wedding idiosyncratic and fun.
I truly have no idea what mine is going to be like.
I've been to lots of weddings. Most were fun. Booze usually helps. But I went to one large wedding a few years back where the number of people drinking could be counted on one hand. It was a blast. A good band, lots of dancing and a good time was had by most. The key was that almost everyone was in AA or NA. So there are dry weddings that are fun. Damned rare though.
My father's family all lives down in Alabama, and are very much hands-in-the-lap, no drinking Baptists, but we don't see them that much (my dad died in '87). When we were planning my first wedding, my mother asked, "So, at the reception, do you think your gay friends will be dancing with each other?
"Um, probably. Why?"
"Because if they are, I want to be sure you seat me where I can see your grandmother's face."
161: If they're anything like the NA/AA people I know, they were completely frickin' tweaked on caffeine, which can also lead to much dancing.
All of my friends who wanted to stroll down the aisle to the Imperial March ended up marrying sensible women who talked them out of it.
Fun things: "Yes, Mom, it should be Ms. and Ms. No, they shouldn't each get their own invitation. Yes, I know that what's done only with couples that are engaged or married. Yes. Yes!"
"Mom?"
By far the best wedding I went to must have been expensive. The bride and groom chartered a boat to take everyone to a nearby (public) island the day before the wedding. Everybody camped overnight (except the respective families who stayed on the boat) and the ceremony was the next day.
Hanging out with everyone on the island and then having all the friends staying up around the campfire drinking and singing was wonderful.
Surely a wedding has to be earnest, if nothing else.
All these silly things seem like they would be disrespectful to the old, religious and tradition-minded people present. I always thought the wedding should be solemn and respectable, and then the reception following the wedding idiosyncratic and fun.
But if the people getting married aren't old, religious or tradition-minded, why on earth should their wedding be like that? It's their big day, it should be exactly how they want it to be, sod anyone else.
I have enjoyed most of the weddings I've been to, though the one in Maine that Snarkout mentioned was really a standout.
Somehow every time wedding season rolls around, I find that what I wore to the previous rounds of weddings won't do for one reason or another. This year's frock just arrived from Nordstroms, and hey! it actually looks quite nice. Later I will see photos of myself in it and decide I can never wear it again, quite probably. Oh, vanity. It is a pity my posture is so terrible, too.
re: 153
Ceilidh dancing is the best. Hated learning it at school -- we had 2 months a year coming up to Christmas when PE was ceilidh dancing -- but once you get older and being drinking in earnest, the sheer genius and wild abandon of it dawns on you.
Last wedding I was at was nice, expensive, but a bit boring and proper. String quartet on the lawn at a Mayfair members only club, etc.
The only non-fun weddings I've been to have been the ones where I've had to pay for alcohol.
Wedding Suicide would be a good name for a rock group. Or Suicide Wedding.!
Every wedding I've ever went to made me want to blow my fucking brains out. Good job, Becks, now I'm depressed. I'm headed over to the Decisions thread to cheer myself up...
172 saddens me greatly, for reasons too myriad to name.
I'm in the midst of planning my wedding right now. We're looking at a ceremony on the rooftop of the reception hall, which is in a Central Park-like park, followed by lunch, open bar & dancing.
But later that night, we plan to honor the Japanese tradition of the nijikai (second party), which is basically a casual night out at a bar with friends. Kind of the best of both worlds, I hope.
I've been involved in a lot of fun divorces. Does that count?
"Because if they are, I want to be sure you seat me where I can see your grandmother's face."
apo, What a cool mother.
gaajin are you getting married in Japan or here?
GB, do I remember correctly that your fiancée is Japanese? Are you doing both the Japanese- and Western-style ceremonies?
we plan to honor the Japanese tradition of the nijikai (second party), which is basically a casual night out at a bar with friends.
My brother's wedding ended with the wedding party and a few others in the hotel bar, and while the wedding was actually pretty nice overall, that was the best part of the night.
I'm getting married in Japan. My fiancee is a Chinese-born Japanese citizen, so she's not so into the whole Japanese thing. We're having a Jewish ceremony, but during the reception we're going to change into traditional Chinese wedding garb to go around to the guests' tables. (That's not us in the photo; it's some random people from a Google search.)
That's not us in the photo
You can admit it, GB.
apo, What a cool mother.
Apo: what a cool mother.
122: Quaker?
The low-alcohol (not no-alcohol) wedding's I've been to that were fun were super-hippie events. People may have ingested alternate mind-altering substances in advance, or they may just have been the kind of people who acted like that all the time.
One that I attended as a teenager was a complete pagan mismash, officiated by an ex-Catholic druid type who invoked every female deity known and then a few that weren't. The highlight of the reception for me was when someone asked the Native American groomsman if the song he had performed "was a real Indian song". Well, he said, he wrote it and performed it, and he's an Indian, so yes, it was a real Indian song.
155 is teh awesome. 156, in combo with the earlier comment, totally makes me want to marry into Labs's family.
The best (and most fun) wedding I have ever been to was a standard church-style wedding but the "seating of the grandmothers" music was "Just Like Heaven" by the Cure and the processional was "Do You Realize" by The Flaming Lips. Everybody there was in full support of the couple w/no infighting or anything. We made a second line processional down the street to the reception hall, and the bride's father did a keg stand. Brilliant.
More on the wedding-industrial complex here from the NYT.
Re: 155, this is pretty cool, too.
my wedding was very fun and people still talk about what a great time they had. we made chatham artillery punch and also had an open bar. instead of sitting down to eat we just had oysters and shrimp at a station and people circulating with trays of canapes and stuff. cheaper and tastier. I made a mix tape of 40s music and we played that. best part was hearing the next day which of my cousins had hooked up with which of my friends after X and I left the party. costs were kept down by having both wedding and reception on my grandad's lawn in wainscott (we rented a tent). also, my grandad paying for the top shelf open bar, I guess that was a factor. I arranged a free place to stay for all my friends (various family members' houses, friends of my grandmother who were out of town) so that people wouldn't have to spend a lot of money.
All these silly things seem like they would be disrespectful to the old, religious and tradition-minded people present.
I see your point, but the couple in question had already demonstrated in myriad ways that they were disinterested in living their lives in accordance with the expectations of anyone religious or tradition-minded and those people, if they showed up for the wedding at all, should have known what they were getting themselves into. As for the old people present, they seemed to be delighted.
My parents had their wedding reception in my grandmother's garden. They were very lucky that it didn't rain, because there was no tent.
I've always thought that it would be nice to have a reception without a sit-down dinner. No seating chart to worry about.
I've always thought that it would be nice to have two receptions. Light refreshment after the service for a huge crowd of people and then a smaller (not small, but smaller) party afterwards. If I could afford to have an open bar for several hundred people, I'd do it, but I don't think that I'll ever be able to.
The best wedding I ever went to was a pagan-lesbian wedding done under a huge, gnarly oak tree in South Carolina. And it was the wedding ceremony itself that was the best. We all stood in a circle and participated in the event by lighting candles and jumping over the broomstick (after the brides did, o'course). And there was a kind of "pagan communion" as part of the ceremony--the brides went around and fed each of us a grape, saying "may you never go hungry" and gave each a sip of wine, saying "may you never thirst." That made me feel as if the wedding were for all of us, not just the brides in question. Oh, and it was officiated by a priest and priestess; that was cool.
Both girls wore white, floofy dresses, though, as they both had that idea of what a bride should look like and both wanted to look really pretty on their wedding day. And they did. Best part was maybe the looks given to us by visitors to the (public) park where the wedding was held--they, to a man, did double-takes when they realized there was a second bride and no groom present.
The reception was fine too: I sang an Indigo Girls song for them, there was a beautiful cake and more wine, but not enough music and booze for my tastes. The ceremony was more memorable, for being different from every other wedding I've ever been to.
I sang an Indigo Girls song for them
At a lesbian wedding? That makes no sense at all.
200: Heh. Yeah, I can even double the triteness* factor. The song was "Power of Two."
If pagan-lesbian wedding songs can ever be called "trite."
Apo, I'm beginning to think we might be related. My family hails from Alabama as well (both paternal and maternal lineages). Full of tee-totalers and drunks, with hardly anyone in between.
Hell yes -- but then, I'm a wedding photographer.
I'm planning my wedding now, and it's going to be the "no church, great party" variety.
