Most brides are highly conscious of how well their wedding day is turning out. As brides tend to be more involved in the planning of the matrimonial celebration than their grooms, they have a greater emotional investment. They want the ceremony to go smoothly and the trip between venues to be traffic-free and for everyone to show up where they are supposed to show up on time.
To put it another way, while a groom might stand un-phased in the face of an unexpected blemish or a spot on his collar, a bride might burst into tears. And, of course, there are lots of other things that can go wrong. Unfortunately, most wedding disaster guides deal with dress emergencies and beauty emergencies rather than vendor emergencies or what to do when the mother of the groom shows up dead drunk.
To prepare for the minor stuff (if you’re a bride or know one), you can put together an wedding day emergency kit that includes:
- Extra pantyhose
- Black socks for clueless grooms or ushers
- Stain removal swabs
- Feminine protection
- An umbrella
- Painkillers
- Sewing kit with color coordinated thread
- Mints
- Band-aids
- Hair pins
- Clear nail-polish
- Safety pins
- Antacids
- Shoe Polish
- Pocket change
- Snacks
- A cell phone
- Hair Spray
For everything else, brides and grooms just have to hope they’ve done their best to prepare for the worst. And if they are curious about worst case scenarios, they can check out Awfully Wedded : Tales of Disaster from the Big Day, a compilation of the most pathetic, heartbreaking, and embarrassing wedding stories ever.
Great idea – except don’t forget one thing – give the handbag containing these items to one of your attendants before the ceremony starts. A few years I went to a wedding where the (control freak) bride insisted on keeping her bag on her shoudler for the trip down the aisle and the ceremony! I can’t even begin to tell you how ridiculous it looked – it was about as necessary as Queen Elizabeth really needing a handbag.
I don’t know how or why, but a few days before my wedding, this incredible feeling of calm completely enveloped me. I think part of it was that I knew I’d done pretty much everything I could reasonably do to make sure the wedding was exactly the one I wanted, and the rest was probably the fact that I’d accepted things go wrong at big events. For some reason, I was seriously at peace with that concept for the first – and most likely last! – time in my life. I think a lot of the people around me would have assumed tranquilizers were involved if I’d been anybody else! LOL!
One thing that helped, though, was that I had a couple reliable people deputized to take care of different sorts of emergencies. A friend of a friend volunteered to organize the food and make sure nothing went wrong with that, another friend kept an eye out for the few professionals and made sure they had what they needed, and I asked one particularly cool-headed friend to keep an eye open in case anyone drank too much so he could take their car keys from them and arrange their safe transport.
Most important of all, though, is a sense of humor. When a friend of mine got married, the wrong cake ended up being delivered to the reception. At first, she was worried. Then she realized a) it was about the same size as the cake she’d ordered, so it would feed everyone, and b) it was someone’s cake for their 50th anniversary. The gold worked in with my friend’s color scheme, and she decided the fact that it celebrated a long, happy marriage was a good omen.
I still laugh at one memory from my own wedding. The site was a redwood grove. There was a picnic area for the reception, and up a small incline, there was an amphitheater for the ceremony. In the middle of our vows, we heard someone arriving late and calling from the picnic area: ‘Hey, I thought there was a wedding out here today!’ To this day I have never discovered the identity of the person who said that, but it still makes me giggle for some reason.
Good point, Phyllis. Those bridal purses look downright silly when on the arm of a bride walking down the aisle.
I actually bought an evening bag with an eye to loading all that sort of emergency gear in it for my brother’s wedding. My sister-in-law, for whom I had made the dress, was very very happy I had those cleaning wipes when a gust of wind blew her skirt against a big black gummy section of the limousine! And then there were the bridesmaids I stitched up here and there … (the gowns, though, not the bridesmaids!) – and I brought about four different umbrellas for her to choose from, because it looked as if it might rain, and I wanted one that would look nice with her dress …
I always take a stack of pretty handkerchiefs. Why have crumpled paper tissue in your hand when it can be a lacy or embroidered handkerchief?
Ooh, good idea, Kai Jones!
the hanky I carried (wrapped around the handle of my bouquet) had actually been my baby hat — snip snip at a few threads and viola, a lovely bridal handkerchief. I purchased a wedding-day emergency kit from Frederick’s of Hollywood and don’t remember needing anything from it, but was calmer knowing that it was in the bridal room. I’d also recommend having a bridesmaid carry some smelling salts — I’ve seen more than one bride get woozy at the altar (lack of food, too much stress, etc).