Wedding Blog

One family I know planned the wedding reception of their eldest daughter at their own house, with much use made of their beautiful garden, and they were happy to keep it a small affair. However, keeping the wedding small meant not inviting some distant relatives, and caused a permanent rift with these family members, who had not realized how peripheral they really were. The Mother of the Bride explained, “If we had had a larger ceremony and reception, and invited all the people we might have felt obliged to invite, it would have been a very different, very crowded, occasion, and quite different from the wedding that we did have, which was very enjoyable, and not too big.”

A Maltese couple I knew who were planning to get married told me that in Malta weddings tend to be really huge, and you have to invite not only your family and close friends, but also, in effect, your whole village. They told me that the expense for most couples turned out to be enormous, but people just had to find the money to do it somehow, as holding a small wedding simply was not an option in Maltese culture and tradition.

An English couple I knew were so overwhelmed at the thought of throwing a big wedding, that eventually they eloped to Gretna Green on a motorcyle, and got married with just the two of them, and the necessary officiators.

So, what to do? Do you have a small wedding and risk offending people, or have a large one and break the bank, as well as losing any feeling of the intimacy of a smallish group of people? This is something that only the couple and their respective families can decide, and even then it can be hard to agree – often the couple themselves would like a small ceremony, but their parents want to invite a lot of their friends and distant relatives. Trying to strike a happy medium is one of the challenges, amongst many others, of organizing a successful wedding.

Filed under: Receptions, Etiquette, Planning