Skip to main content

Budget Bride I: Put Your Friends and Family to Work

Welcome to the Budget Bride series, in which I share wisdom from my "recessionista" wedding in 2007 on how to treat a small budget as a creative opportunity rather than an obstacle to the beginning of a shared lifetime of gorgeous memories. Over ten Thursdays, I am sharing updated tips on how to use the friction of financial restriction to spark the kind of light, warmth, joy, and graciousness in a wedding that money can't buy anyway. My husband and I have enjoyed almost 15 years of happy marriage (not without ups and downs but with the tools to handle challenges while remaining best buds with benefits), and we'll always have our wonderful memories of our wedding day to look back on--not just in shiny, retouched photographs but in the visceral reliving of the actual experience.

Whether you've struck it rich in the stock market or you're just grateful to have survived the past year, there is timeless wisdom in starting a marriage by setting an intentional rhythm, mood, and feeling of expectation with a well-designed wedding celebration. I am not referring specifically to aesthetic design; visual aesthetics are only one part of the whole multi-sensory and emotional presentation of a properly hosted event. A joyful experience can be had at any price point, and sometimes it actually helps not to be distracted by too many supposed shortcuts or unnecessary add-ons that can be purchased.

Today's post, "Budget Bride I," highlights the engaged couple as members of a community. If you are planning a wedding with guests you want to invite to witness your union, then despite what you may have observed from American pop convention, the day should not be all about you or even about you and your fiance but about the whole web of relationships in which the two of you are embedded. Each one of us owes our culture, elements of our personality, genes, and understanding of love largely to the people we come from and the people we've chosen to share our lives with. A wedding invites a community of family and friends to bless the union between two people, and it also gives the couple a chance to let their loved ones shine through contributions of personal talent and flavor.

To avoid coming off as a bridezilla, don't begin with an assumption that everyone you know with useful skills is obligated to contribute them for free or to be micromanaged in how they contribute their skills, if they choose to do so. As you begin planning your wedding, before you send out your registry, let your loved ones know that you would appreciate gifts of skill in creating the wedding itself in lieu of purchased gifts. You can also ask people individually if they would like to contribute in that way and how they would like to do it. Allow them a generous measure of creative freedom that feels good to both of you. Make sure you’re on the same page from the beginning in terms of big stuff like your moral values and the accessibility needs of your guests, and then give your volunteers just as much guidance as they want.

If there are non-negotiable aesthetic details that you want done a very specific way, consider taking care of those elements yourself or hiring a paid professional at a fair price. As much as possible, though, let it go and open your mind to a more collaborative vision of your big day so that feelings of gratitude and appreciation can flow between you and your loved ones and so that your big day can become something more than the sum of its eclectic--and extremely personalized--parts.

A collaborative wedding is one that honors the married couple, the friends and family who contribute to it, and all of the relationships among the collaborators. It might not turn out as slick as a professionally produced event, but it will be more personal, memorable, and meaningful. To process all worst-case scenarios and laugh off any anxieties about relinquishing control and navigating conflicts, revisit a 2000s-era classic wedding comedy such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding! Then...


Put Your Friends and Family to Work

If you are planning on getting married in a recession, congratulations! High unemployment can work in your favor. Gather together all of your friends and family with mad skills and nothing to do, and put 'em to work on your fabulous recessionista wedding!


Businesses will try to make you believe that you need to hire a hundred different people to perform a bunch of services for your wedding--not so. You can have an extremely fabulous celebration at any budget with enough creativity and help from your friends and family. Allow your favorite people to give you gifts of their time and talents for free or at a VIP discount. These gifts can include musical performances, cooking, baking, photography, beauty treatments, sewing, jewelry lending, growing and arranging flowers, setup and cleanup, even officiating your ceremony.


My wedding had a budget of $6,000 for about 100 guests. With a little ingenuity, we stretched that budget into the most glorious wedding and reception that we could have dreamed. Years later, our friends are still talking about our wedding and using it as inspiration to plan their own!


The bridesmaids and I had our hair and nails done by a student at an educational salon on the cheap. But you can save a lot more by enlisting your cousin in beauty school to lend their artistic flair to your wedding party's beauty regime. Our makeup was done on-site for $10 a face by a friend of the Maid of Honor who was working the MAC makeup counter at the mall. If you go and talk to the workers at department store beauty counters, you'll find that they often own their own arsenals of makeup products and tools, and they can freelance for very low fees.


Make sure your bridesmaids and groomsmen know they aren't just there to look pretty. A formally dressed bride and groom need people who can get them dressed, bustled, tied, whatever. Also to help you pee if you wear a traditional dress. Ah, so elegant.


All of my jewelry was "something borrowed" or gifted by my mother-in-law.


We rented chairs and tables from A-1 Rental and had the groomsmen and a few other friends and relatives set them up.


Having a friend who is a minister comes in handy at a wedding, especially if you are not a member of a church. I was married by my boss! A coworker played cello during the ceremony, and many of the flowers were provided by my mom's and grandma's gardens. We bought tulips from a florist, but the other flowers, including bleeding hearts and lilacs, were homegrown. They smelled amazing.


The musical entertainment at our reception was performed by a fellow my husband met playing a gig at a local bar: Lord of the Yum-Yum, a.k.a. Chicago musician Paul Velat. Nobody even knew what hit them when the show started with classical music beat-boxing, throat singing, and absurdist performance art. After dinner, he entertained us some more with spontaneous break dancing.


Getting lots of friends and family involved in your wedding is beneficial in so many unexpected ways. It's worth all the chaos. This is YOUR big day, princess, but what could possibly be more important to you than sharing your joy with the people you love?


The wedding photos were taken by a pair of photojournalists, one of whom is a big success these days but worked for cheap when he was just starting out, and another who offered her services to us free, as a gift. They managed to capture all of the authentic, spontaneous moments, and those photos mean more to us than the formal and cutesy staged shots.


Enlisting your own family and friends to contribute to your wedding with their skills, talents, and connections makes for a richer experience and a more personalized, meaningful set of memories than anything you could pay strangers to provide.

Happy planning!

Labels:

Comments

  1. EsperanzitaMay 8, 2009 at 9:32 PM

    Seriously one the the happiest days of my life, and I wasn't even the one getting married!!

    Still, the joining of the lives of two of my bestest friends (not to mention two of the coolest people to ever walk the planet) was celebrated that day!

    The cherry on the sundae was that it was so chic and so cheap! Well done, wifey!!

    besitos!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Miss MoppetMay 8, 2009 at 10:13 PM

    Your wedding was absolutely fabulous! I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner, but you should really submit a form to www.offbeatbride.com. I bet they'd feature your wedding in a heartbeat! Seriously. You'd be net-famous for a few minutes. At least among hippie and retro brides!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

35 Great Things About Turning 35

The prime of life starts at 35! It's the best-kept secret from younger people, but your 35th birthday is a major cause for celebration. For mine, I have made my own listicle of 35 reasons why experts agree that 35 is the best age to be: You get to say, "I'm 35." The number 35 carries so much more gravitas than 30, but you're only a few years older. At 34, I've started fudging my age--by adding a year. People automatically take me seriously, and if they don't, at least they tell me I look young for my age. (Eye roll, hair toss, "whatever.")    35-year-olds DGAF. Inner chill reaches new heights at 35. Despite its #2 status on this list, it's the #1 response I hear about what's best about hitting 35. My gorgeous friend Nerlie was beautiful and resilient and wise beyond her years in high school, but now, at age 35, she gets to fully enjoy being herself on her own terms. She writes,  "I've survived so much that I don't
15 comments
Read more

The Incredible Lightness of Loss

We Americans are losing so much right now: loved ones to death, other relationships to political violence and conspiracy theories. Americans are losing touch with reality, losing beliefs, losing real freedom and trust and patience and hope. Some of that loss comes with searing pain, but every loss can also give us a new lightness, if we know how to sense it--the unburdening of worry, shame, failure, obligation, terror, naivety, delusion. Even when we lose what we desperately wanted to keep, we find our hands and eyes and hearts left open to new sources of light. I am reminded of the first time I traveled abroad without family or personal friends--when I went to study abroad in Rome, and upon landing was robbed of my baggage. (What a funny metaphor, right? But it wasn't funny to me at the time--it was terrifying.) I was, to put it nicely, not one of the rich kids on that trip. Not only could I not afford to replace the belongings I needed, I was already running up a deficit in the p
Post a Comment
Read more

Budget Bride III: Location, Location, Location

Today's Budget Bride post affirms that a wedding isn't just about providing a cool photo backdrop for the star couple. The location and venue create the environment that shapes the whole experience. Location determines who can attend, how much and what kinds of fun everyone can have, and how everyone feels throughout the ceremony and reception. In addition to accessibility, aesthetics, and amenities offered at the site, there's also the general aura the place gives off. Is the site associated with historic events? Legendary romance? Is there anything ugly associated with it, like bigoted owners who refuse to support unions between people who are not of their preferred race or gender combinations? If your guests can possibly know the answers to those questions, your choice of venue will send a message that includes the values associated with it. A blank slate is just fine, but take care to avoid obvious stinkers like gay-hating orchards and slavery-stained plantations (that
Post a Comment
Read more

The Last $Monday: Dumpster Dived FIRE

The cursed year 2020 is finally ending! Let us warm our cold, tired bodies beside this dumpster fire and, before it goes out, dive in to salvage the embers that will spark new joys in 2021. For example, this is the last $Monday post I am going to write for " Money Money 2020 ," but it won't be the last time I write about money at all. I am simply going to change my focus to clarify that money is a means, not an end--and that personal finance isn't the only means to achieve our ends. During the 2010s, many of us were briefly interested in the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early) and ultimately discarded it as neither practical nor joyful for most people, because it only works if you can score yourself a six-figure income as a young adult (unrealistic for most Americans) and if your big life goals can wait until you're middle-aged (in other words, if you're willing to risk running out of time before running out of money ).  There are components
Post a Comment
Read more

$Monday: Boots Theory

Fans of author Terry Pratchett understand the importance of investing in good footwear. Pictured here are my husband's work boots and some of my "work boots" (for the office, heh). In both categories are shoes that are over 15 years old. In Terry Pratchett's 1993 novel Men at Arms , one of the characters realizes: The reason that the rich were so rich...was because they managed to spend less money.  He goes on to explain, "Take boots, for example. ...A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ...But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and
Post a Comment
Read more

$Monday: Testing a New Kitchen Design Before Renovation

My husband and I planned to renovate our worn-out kitchen this year, with my dad's help. And--oop!--we all know what happened to everyone's plans for 2020. There is no way I can keep my family fed properly through the pandemic in my designed-circa-1990, tacked-together, corner-cut, stingy-cheap, crazy, nailed-it-wrong kitchen nightmare that has been crumbling, grumbling, rotting, rusting, and breaking since we bought this house in 2008. We have to do something, so we turned a setback into an opportunity to slow down and beta test some of our new kitchen ideas with temporary staging. It might look insane, but who cares? We won't be having the queen over for tea anytime soon, so we can take time to play with space and function before we commit to building permanent structures and finishing surfaces. For example, open shelves are not practical for everyone. They don't hide clutter or protect things from dust. However, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen and prefer
Post a Comment
Read more

$Monday: How to Make Do Without Hoarding

As more of us stare down the possibility of weeks in quarantine, it's easy to understand why some people are panic shopping. There's not much else to do when most activity and gathering places are shuttered. And many people are terrified--if not of the coronavirus itself, then of the disruptions to daily life and supply chains. But hoarding is disastrous to society; crowding ourselves into grocery stores is a serious health hazard; and there's no stockpile of stuff big enough to last through a doomsday scenario in which--oh, dare I say it--coffee beans become unavailable for the long term. (Not that I believe that will happen, but...) What are we to do? We can take a lesson from our grandparents who lived through the Great Depression and start learning how to do without some of the things people didn't always have. Some of the things we consider "essential" are things which we can, honestly, live without. Here is a list of items that some people are hoardi
Post a Comment
Read more

$Monday: The Life-Preserving Magic of Hunkering Down

Here I am trying to show off the new silver streak in my hair that matches all my cozy gray loungewear. There's no banishing the gray this year--the hair, the clouds gathering outside, the moods of quarantine, the mental fog--so we might as well embrace it with as much warmth and compassion as we can. In a dreadful and lonely time, my anxiety tells me I need to get out and do more, to do people favors, to keep someone company, to reach out, to find a change of scene, to earn more money in case of financial disaster, but my rational mind knows that the most helpful thing I can do for my family and community during a pandemic is to hunker down.  Settle in, simmer down, think small and simple and safe. Make smart, long-term investments of time, attention, energy, and resources for the next year. This is not the season to hustle and produce more, it’s time to wait patiently and conserve. The best most of us can do right now is damage control. A pandemic is no time for big risks or gamb
Post a Comment
Read more

TBT: Dandelions for Wine, Salads, Bees, and Beauty

Spring is coming! Soon the snow will melt for good, buds will emerge, birds will nest, and dandelions will decorate green lawns with bright yellow polka dots. Long ago, when I wrote the post below, I branded myself the "Recessionista Genie" and lauded the joys and benefits of an organic dandelion crop. Since then, the trend (at least in my kind of suburbia) has continued away from Hank Hill lawns and toward colorful, maximalist, slightly wild urban landscapes that support pollinators and healthier ecosystems. We are still all about the dandelion life. Dandelions for Wine, Salads, Bees, and Beauty I don't mean to brag or anything... but I have had a bumper crop of dandelions already this year. As all children under the age of five know, dandelions are pretty flowers. They are sunshiny yellow and signal the beginning of warm weather. Since the 1950s, the era of the suburban "postage stamp" Astro-turfy lawn, we have been taught to see dandelions and ot
2 comments
Read more