In short, even a lot of people who admired the commitment these couples made to living lightly on Mother Earth wouldn’t be caught dead in a ditch looking – or smelling – like them.

But times have changed. You don’t have to be a card-carrying hippie to care about the environment anymore. and you don’t have to completely reject both tradition and fashion to follow your convictions.


To start with, think about decorations that are consumable. For instance, the centerpiece on this reception table not only looks gorgeous, but feeds your guests at the same time. Bowls of fresh fruit, small platters of appetizers, pretty jugs or pitchers of beverages, candies, or even an attractive cake for the table’s dessert… any of these things will look fabulous, taste great, and save on your budget for fresh flowers and non-organic decorations.

Alternately, consider putting live plants in pretty pots on the tables for decoration.

Really consider how many paper goods you need… and forget about the rest.

Yes, you’ll need invitations and RSVP cards. You’ll need thank you cards of some sort. But think hard about whether you really need ceremony programs. Decide whether you would rather have your guests decide their own seating, eliminating the need for place cards. As for menus, doing without entirely, making only one per table to be shared, or setting up an attractive chalk board for the whole room are all viable alternatives to one at each place at each table.

Oh, and never forget that you can find invitations and all the rest printed on recycled paper.

Second hand doesn’t have to be second best. Maybe someone close to you has the most gorgeous wedding gown just hanging in her closet. Maybe you find a fabulous veil in a consignment shop. Perhaps your aunt has some serving pieces she’s ready to let go. You might even find the perfect ring pillow in a garage sale. Why let these wonderful things go to waste? Give them a home and a second chance.

Remember to check for natural fibers. Cotton, linen, silk, and wool are natural fibers. Rayon is a synthetic fiber made of natural materials. Nylon, polyester, acetate, and so on are not natural fibers by any definition. If you’re going green, synthetic fibers are not what you’re looking for… though if they’re being re-used I won’t tell anyone!

If you have leftovers left over, try to find a green way of disposing of them. In some cases, you may be able to donate leftover food to a local soup kitchen or homeless shelter. If your meal won’t meet the legal requirements, then set out Chinese takeout boxes and invite your guests to take some food home with them. Mr. Twistie and I did this one (though I wish I had thought of the boxes at the time!), and it was a big hit. In fact, we’d seriously overbought food for fear of people leaving hungry, and a couple of our friends lived on leftovers from our wedding for days afterwards.

Keep it real, my friends… but feel free to forget about patchouli and incense. Unless that’s your bag, man.

Dessert tables are expected to continue to be a big deal in weddings. Variety is the spice of life, and a wonderful way to end a reception meal.

A further wrinkle on this trend that’s on the rise for parties that last late into the night is a second spread of snacks offered to guests on their way out. Doughnuts, cookies, sliders, coffee and cocoa… this is the chance to offer up a tasty final gift to your guests.


Alternatives to flowers are another trend on the rise. Paper, brooches, fabric, feathers… if it can substitute for flowers, someone’s using it. This is a great trend if you’re dealing with allergies or want to DIY your bouquets and centerpieces over time. But real flowers are hardly going anywhere.

More brides have been doing DIY projects for their weddings, and that isn’t changing anytime soon. Whether it’s to save money, add uniquely personal touches, or honor a family tradition, using your own hands to put at least a couple pieces of your wedding together can be tremendously satisfying.

Green is clearly the way to go in the coming year. From invitations of recycled paper to living plant centerpieces, to packets of wildflower seeds as favors, brides and grooms everywhere are getting eco-friendly and loving it.

More weddings than ever are happening in the great outdoors. Whether it’s a garden, a beach, the woods, couples are choosing the sky as the ceiling they prefer. As someone who had an outdoor wedding and loved it, I say go for it… just make sure you have a backup plan in case of inclement weather.

Of course trends are fun, but never follow one if it feels wrong to you. You should do what matters to you.

Oh, and if your cake isn’t going to be either round or square, don’t panic! They include equally handy guides for tiers shaped like hearts, flowers, ovals, and paisley, too.

If you’re the one baking your own cake (or you’re giving the job to someone close to you who is a great baker but hasn’t done this level of work before), you can also find great tips on the site for how to construct, decorate, display, and even transport this all-important confectionary creation to your reception site.

There is a section of recipes, but I have to say they didn’t impress me much. Frankly, I would look elsewhere.

But if you need to find a speciality pan, pastry bags and decorating tips, or display items to get you going, Wilton is a great place to start.

But after all of this effort, you really don’t want to spend your wedding night getting plastered. Well, maybe you do, but if that’s the case, just move along, nothing to see here. If, on the other hand, you have concerns about overdoing the festivities and don’t like that idea, just follow me after the cut for some sage advice on how to have a great time but still keep your head at your wedding.

My first piece of advice is this: be sure to eat on your wedding day. Seriously, this is probably the number one reason brides and grooms wind up overdoing the bubbly and spending more of the night fighting to get at the porcelain god than enjoying their first night of marital bliss.

Many brides and grooms are terribly nervous, come the big day. Whether it’s concern about something going wrong, cold feet, or simple stage fright, it’s easy to let those nerves make you think you can’t keep anything solid down. And then all too often, members of the bridal party are right there telling you nothing relieves the jitters and settles the tummy better than a glass of bubbly.

If you’re concerned that nerves might make you less than hungry, deputize someone to feed you on your wedding day. Talk to them beforehand about what sorts of food you think you might be able to handle in a crisis.

Remember, an empty stomach only makes the alcohol hit your system faster, and that means it takes a lot less for you to hit the floor.

Find another way to relax other than drinking. Drinking does relax people. It’s a depressant. That’s what depressants do. And in moderation, it’s good, clean fun that the whole adult family can enjoy. But it’s a depressant with consequences… you know, like most depressants. So if you can find a way of avoiding the stress or reducing it in a way that doesn’t involve alcohol, you won’t find yourself reaching quite as eagerly for the bottle and have a better chance of staying in control. So look for something like a breathing exercise, or something thing useful you can be doing with your hands. Go for a run before you have to get ready, or mentally calculate what the Titanic would have weighed had it been made of balsa wood. It doesn’t really matter what you’re doing, so long as it is something that relaxes you.

Be certain there are drinks at your reception that don’t include alcohol. This is just good advice, anyway. After all, chances are there’s someone on your guest list who either doesn’t drink or does so quite abstemiously. And if people have the option to drink less booze, well, that can save on the catering bill as well as making it that much less likely that anyone will overindulge. So do mix your drinks. Have a glass of champagne, and then make the next one fruit juice or water.

Remember, alcohol can contribute to dehydration… which makes you thirstier, which makes you drink more and makes the alcohol hit harder. Mixing it up with non-alcoholic drinks keeps you hydrated, which reduces your need for more drinks.

Have a receiving line. This is not only excellent etiquette, it’s also a helpful way of making sure you get to sit down and eat your reception meal rather than spending the dinner hour going from table to table and hunting down stragglers you missed. Remember, it’s just as important to eat at the reception as it is before the ceremony.

Look, everybody overindulges in something sometime. It’s not the end of the world if you do get tipsy at your own wedding. If it happens, try not to dwell. Let it go and go on with your life.

But if one ounce of this prevention keeps you from needing bail money on your wedding night… that’s a heck of a lot better than a cure!

Enjoy responsibly.

On the Amy Atlas Events blog, Amy herself shares a few tips and tricks that will help the DIYers out there create an incredible dessert buffet. Speaking as someone who recently discovered that she likes designing the look and feel of events, I’d wager that something like a candy buffet or dessert buffet would be a relatively simple project. Much less stressful than, say, baking a wedding cake or sewing a wedding dress.

*my drug of choice

The two episodes I watched last night were particularly interesting to me, in that they included some really brilliant and some really, really questionable ideas. Take a look after the cut to see what I’m talking about.

Good idea #1: The milk and cookie bar. One of the couples last night featured a bride of nineteen summers and her groom who was only eighteen. I’m not getting into whether it’s a good or a bad idea to marry that young. It’s legal and everyone around them seemed down with the idea. The thing is, they were both too young to drink alcohol. Most of their friends were too young to drink. They were also holding their reception in the church hall, where alcohol may not have been permitted no matter what the age of the couple involved. So these wacky kids on a half a shoestring budget got creative and put together a milk and cookies bar.

Friends and family baked chocolate chip, snickerdoodles, and at least half a dozen other kinds of cookies. These were put in glass jars and stacked on platters with prettily lettered labels to identify them for everyone. Then there were big glass bottles of milk nestled in ice in large metal pails. And then there were the flavorings. Guests could have chocolate or strawberry flavored powder or they could take it straight. The bride and groom even toasted with milk.

If you’re having a dry reception and want to remember those innocent milk and cookies days, or if you’re having a lot of kids at your wedding and want an attractive way of keeping them away from the champagne, this is a fun, festive, relatively inexpensive way of handling the situation.

Bad Idea #1: Don’t have your groom do a striptease at the reception… not even if he used to be a star dancer for Chippendale’s. No, really, this happened. I know it was his fourth wedding, and I know that even at 53 the dude’s still got a smokin’ body (really, I would have felt pretty certain of that even if he hadn’t started tearing his clothes off and grinding his package two inches from the bride’s face), but this is one of the very few things that get a flat-out No Freaking Way In Hades! from me. Save the private dancer routine for the bridal suite, folks.

Good Idea #2: Combine colorful touches from your backgrounds… and don’t be afraid to use ideas from both sides if your backgrounds are different. One of last night’s brides was of an Indian heritage and her groom was Latino. It was an event combining saris and sombreros. She was decked out in full Hindu glory. In the Indian tradition, the groom usually arrives at the ceremony at the head of a parade of family and friends and mounted on a white pony. This gentleman headed the parade on his beloved motorcycle. The reception featured tortillas and goat curry on the menu. There was a mariachi band and men doing rope tricks. All in all, it was a party I wanted to be enjoying up close and personal.

Bad Idea #2: One bride had food stations at her reception. Unfortunately, she had just two and she placed them right next to one another so that getting food wound up requiring getting in one huge line. Food stations are a great idea if you’re doing buffet-style service, but do make sure they’re spread out so the lines aren’t too long.

Good idea #3: One bride provided a double-decker bus tour between the ceremony and reception. If your ceremony venue and reception venue are a significant distance apart, consider providing some form of fun transportation if it will fit into your budget. This one also took care of the dreaded question of what to do with guests while the bride and groom are being photographed from every conceivable angle.

Good Idea #4: If you’ve got kids, include them in the proceedings. Two of the brides last night had children – one had three daughters from a previous marriage while the other had a toddler son with her groom – and both brides included their kids. The one with the three daughters made the oldest her MOH and the younger two her flower girls. The one with the little boy made him her ring bearer. The little ring bearer did go running in the wrong direction at one point, but once shown where Daddy was standing raced his little legs off down the aisle until his dad could scoop him up in his arms and hold him through the ceremony. It doesn’t get more personal than this, folks.

And a Cautionary Tale. One bride had a lovely outdoor ceremony on a waterfront, followed immediately by an outdoor cocktail hour at dusk. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody had checked out the insect situation. The champagne was set up directly behind a nest of fire ants, and as the sun set the gnats came out in droves. That single detail is no doubt why she wound up in fourth place out of four.

I love an outdoor wedding, heck I had one myself! But do be sure to investigate what kinds of bugs gather where you’re having your big event and proceed thoughtfully.

Oh I know it’s a bright, aggressive color. I know a little can go a long way. I also know it goes with and brings out the best in a wide variety of colors. I also know it’s a wonderful color for a happy celebration like a wedding.

Not convinced? Take a look under the cut at the cheery gallery of orange wedding details I’ve put together. Please note that there is not a single one that looks like Halloween.

Flowers are an obvious place to start with any color, and orange is no exception. They can be dramatic, or they can be relaxed and sweetly old-fashioned.

The right invitation sets the tone for the entire wedding.

Of course, the decoration at the wedding site itself is a great place to play with color.

So are the reception tables,

the buffett,

and the cake table.

Don’t forget the wedding party!

Of course, my mother always said a good pair of orange shoes will carry you anywhere in style. Looking at these, I do believe she was right. Just imagine them peeping out from under your wedding gown, and see if you don’t agree with good old mom.

I said “on cake” because there is no rule stating that flowers must be used on or in desserts. Cooking with flowers is coming back into vogue and has a long history. Flowery cookery can be traced back to ancient Rome, China, India, and the Middle East. Edible flowers were particularly popular in the Victorian era during Queen Victoria’s reign. And now edible flowers are starting to appear in dishes at wedding receptions.

I think it’s a fun (and potentially delicious) idea that can add a little pizazz and personality and color to a reception meal. If you go this route, make sure your caterer has some experience working with or cooking with flowers to avoid things like, oh, food poisoning or pesticide poisoning. That’s important, since even though there are plenty of edible flowers, not all of them are grown to be eaten. Stick to organically-grown blossoms or blooms grown specifically for human consumption.

Thinking about DIYing your wedding menu? Rosalind Creasy’s book Recipes from the Garden has plenty of recipes featuring fresh flowers, from stuffed zucchini blossoms to vibrantly colorful fresh salads.

Brides and grooms not putting together their own reception lunches or dinners can still approach their caterers with floral recipes they’ve found in cookbooks and online. SheKnows has recipes for things like rosemary flower biscuits and pansy herb salad. No matter who is doing the cooking, be sure they know that flowers should be used sparingly in recipes since most blossoms function like herbs. They can have strong flavors (think spicy or minty) and can also be difficult to digest in large quantities.

Doesn’t that look lovely… and yummy, too?

On the other hand, when one of my cousins got married, my aunt was convinced one single, solitary salmon was going to feed all two hundred people coming to the wedding. If my grandmother and great aunt hadn’t stepped in bringing a brigade of church ladies with them, goodness alone knows how many would have starved that fateful day.

I feel very sure nobody here wants to host a reception that peters out due to famished guests making a run for the nearest fast food option. I feel equally sure nobody here wants to offer up something that half their guest list can’t eat. And of course due consideration must be paid to budget concerns, family or ethnic traditions, your own food morals, and availability of ingredients.

Sound complex? Don’t panic. This is mostly a matter of common sense intersecting with taste and a touch of consideration for your guests. You do this every time you invite someone over for dinner. This is just putting the same principles to work on a larger scale.

1) Think about the overall feel and level of formality of the event. Whether your wedding reception is a formal sit-down dinner, a chic cocktail party, a down-home hoedown, a Victorian picnic, or a 50′s sock hop, there’s a kind of food that’s already appropriate. Ignore any sort of food that doesn’t fit. After all, you probably wouldn’t have cheeseburger sliders at a formal sit-down meal and there’s no point in serving filet mignon and asparagus at a sock hop. But those cheeseburgers would be great at the sock hop or even a cocktail party.

2) Consider how much money you have to spend, and everything you have to spend it on. Remember that your catering budget needs to cover not only the food, but the plates, cutlery, linens, and service as well. Divide your total budget by the number of people you’re feeding (don’t forget yourself and the rest of the wedding party!) and you’ll know how much you have to spend per person…and don’t forget that includes all those things I was talking about earlier.

If you’re working with a caterer, don’t forget to ask if the price per head rate includes those plates and forks and tablecloths, or if they’re separate charges. Also, be sure to discuss gratuities before you sign on the dotted line.

If you’re self catering, don’t forget to budget for these items before you set your menu in stone.

3) Consider the needs of your guests. I knew going in that my MOH had a potentially lethal peanut allergy, there were half a dozen vegetarians and several guests who occasionally flirted with vegetarianism, several guests who kept at least moderately kosher, one who was allergic to chocolate, a couple (including myself and a newly recovering alcoholic) who were teetotal…there were a number of issues to keep in mind. Chances are you’ll have a few, too. Make sure there are options for those who need them.

4) Be aware of what food facilities you have available. If you’re holding your reception in a banquet hall, chances are they have everything you could ever want or need in terms of food preparation and serving options. You can relax on this point. On the other hand, there are people like me who get married out in the woods where all that’s provided is tables. You may be holding your reception at home or in a park or at a clubhouse. Wherever you’re going to be, make sure you know what’s available to work with before you set your menu.

If you’ve got no oven, don’t pick foods that will require one on site. If you have nothing but a small barbeque pit to work with, plan your menu around that. In my case, since there were no prep facilities or cooking options on site of any kind, I went with picnic foods that didn’t need on site cooking and could be kept plenty cool with liberal use of bags of ice from the grocery store.

Don’t fight your facilities. Use them wisely.

5) Don’t make it difficult on your guests. If you’re having a cocktail reception or a cocktail hour in your reception, don’t pass appetizers that take two hands to eat. If you’re serving something your guests are going to be unfamiliar with, make sure there’s an explanation handy, whether it’s a printed card or a person to tell them what it is.

6) Don’t forget what you like and believe in. If you’re a vegetarian and it’s important to you not to serve meat, then don’t. If you keep kosher, your guests can do the same for one meal. If you don’t drink, whether for religious reasons, because of alcoholism, or simply because you’re concerned about legal liabilities if someone insists on driving home after one too many glasses of champagne, you don’t have to serve it. Don’t make a big deal out of it, but don’t apologize, either. This is your wedding. It should reflect both your tastes and your beliefs.

Anyone who needs red meat, pork, shellfish, or a drink can have one later. Nobody will die from lack of steak or lack of booze in one meal.

7) If you can’t afford enough of something for everyone to have some, don’t serve it. I will never forget the wedding I attended where there was a tiny dish of artichoke hearts on the buffet. I love artichoke hearts, so I took some, as in more than one. After all, there were probably about fifteen in the bowl and about sixty people eating, so I assumed someone would top it up as they were eaten. Imagine my mortification when I realized that bowl of fifteen artichoke heats was supposed to last all sixty of us the whole afternoon! Nobody should be embarrassed to eat a treat at a party. Nobody should be forced to watch others eat their favorite treat while being unable to get even a bite.

You eat what your guests eat. I’ve seen a few caterers and brides on television suggest that the bridal party – or even just the bride and groom – get a more expensive meal that is not available to anyone else. Do not take a leaf from this book. How rude would it be to eat surf and turf while your guests are chowing down on rubber chicken? If you don’t want to eat it, chances are a lot of your guests don’t want to eat it, either.

9) Everything tastes better in a happy atmosphere. So you’re not serving the gourmet meal of your dreams for your wedding because you can’t afford it. That’s a bummer, but if you can find a way to be content with what you have, and concentrate on the joy of the occasion and the good company of your guests, you and they will enjoy the meal more than if you allow yourself to fixate on the meal you’d dreamed of.

10) Relax. Have fun with this. Picking a wedding meal requires some consideration, but as long as you’re thoughtful of your guests needs, and keep your budget in mind, you’ll do just fine.

These tasty examples come from Better Batch Bakers, a cookie company in MA that ships its sweets via postal mail. The bakers and cookie designers at BBB will work with you to extend your wedding theme (or color scheme) into your dessert or wedding favors. Sure, they’re a little pricey at $3.25 per 2.5″ cookie, but that’s no more expensive than most other wedding favors or wedding cake serving prices out there.