I have a lot of feelings and frustrations about how hard it was to make our wedding really about us. We have mostly classic taste and chose a fairly traditional venue so we had to put a lot of thought and effort into adding personal touches. This proved really difficult when working with vendors for whom every wedding is just another gig and I’ll talk in another post about the struggle of personalizing things like the schedule, the set list, the video, and the menu where you’re having to negotiate around standard packages and habits.
Less emotionally draining but equally exhausting in other ways were our many DIY touches, including an elaborate seating chart idea, individualized menus, dance cards, custom games, and a whole host of fun ideas that flopped completely from our guest book alternative to our badly bungled favours. Another can of worms I’ll post about some other time.
We also wrote our own vows (a necessary evil) and I wrote the ceremony script for our officiant. The latter is the second most commented upon thing from our wedding. It was a big hit and something I highly recommend doing if you’re at all inclined towards writing (unless you don’t really care about personalization or trust your officiant to personalize it for you; in which case, I congratulate you on your chill).
But the single most commented-upon thing at my wedding was actually the easiest element of personalization in the entire planning process. This gets brought up every single time anyone mentions my wedding and it was literally a last minute idea I thought up and executed in a couple of hours tops. It cost zero dollars and didn’t make me cry once (at least not in a bad way).
Every table received a personalized letter.
That’s it. Super simple, even a little hokey. But it made such a massive impact.
It was important to me when doing our seating chart that everyone be placed with people they had things in common with rather than just grouping everyone together based on how I know them. I’d been to too many weddings where I was stuck with mutual friends I don’t like or people who just happened to be my age and I knew I wanted to get the tables talking to ease some of the social awkwardness (the best thing you can do for your dance floor is make everyone as comfortable as possible with as many fellow guests as possible before the music even starts). So, in most cases, that meant I had to make some introductions.
You remember that scene in Bridget Jones when she’s learning how to work the room at a book launch and her friend tells her to “introduce people with interesting facts” CHECK? That’s actually some of the best advice I’ve ever heard and it’s something I try to do regularly in real life. But I knew I didn’t want to be a bride who leaves my own dinner in order to wander table to table, so I’d have to do it in writing. So, at tables where a bunch of people didn’t know each other, I devoted a couple sentences to each person: how I know them, what they mean to me, something cool about them (this person was almost cast in a Spielberg film, that person was on Jeopardy, so-and-so left a major gig to fly thousands of miles to be here today- all real examples).
I’m also really big on compliments; that helped. I’m an arts critic by trade so “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” has never been useful advice (I don’t think it’s very good advice for anyone, really, but it’s especially bad advice for me). I think far better advice is the adaptation of “if you have something nice to say, Say It”. I don’t know why (fear of rejection/vulnerability? Generally thoughtlessness? Eternal competition?) but no one really compliments each other anymore. I made the decision years ago that I was gonna go the other way. I have a reputation as a kind of negative person (again, critic) so I try really hard to say every good thing out loud. As a result, my friends are fairly used to being called hot, brilliant, and interesting. In my defense, they are pretty hot, brilliant, and interesting. It still seems to have surprised them to see it in writing though.
They were all slightly different. I talked about who everyone was, why they were seated together, what made that group special, and why they were assigned that particular table name (our tables were all Shakespeare plays: the smart kids were at Titus Andronicus, the people with childish senses of humour were seated at Coriolanus, the Disney fans were at a Midsummer Night’s Dream, my parents’ friends at Merry Wives of Windsor).
Pretty much everyone took a picture of their table letter and not a single one was left behind at the end of the evening. I’m not kidding when I say people are still talking about these silly letters. They took me like twenty minutes a piece to write, nothing got a second draft, and my husband printed them at work for free. I stuffed them in envelopes, wrote the table names on the front, and threw them in with the centerpieces to be placed during set-up.
Personalization isn’t just about the bride and groom, it’s also about the people in the room with whom you’ve chosen to spend the day. Table letters break the ice (let’s face it, weddings can be super awkward for some guests, that ice needs breaking), build bonds, and make everyone feel appreciated. I truly cannot recommend anything more if you’re looking to make a big impact without adding to your stress or budget.
My Wedding World 