Getting Ready for a Wedding: The Gown

Many a bride, the experts say, hurries to purchase her wedding gown as soon as she becomes engaged. I have to admit that when my daughter announced her plans to marry, the first thing we both wanted to do was to go dress shopping. On the very coldest day of January 2008, we drove more than 100 miles round trip to attend a bridal sale, and found just the gown she wanted. She looked gorgeous in it, and I’m confident that we made the right decision.

In retrospect, however, I would advise taking the gown selection process a tad more slowly than we did. Ladies—this is the most expensive dress you will ever buy. And, unless you break into the movies or run for vice president, it is likely that more people will see you in your wedding gown than in any other garment you will ever own. So it’s worth while to take a deep breath, exhale, and really enjoy locating the perfect dress.

Wedding dresses are Big Business in the United States. American women spend nearly $1 billion annually on their wedding gowns, and another $400 million on bridesmaids’ gowns. There are more than 200 bridal design companies in the United States, but the industry is dominated by several “full service” bridal shops. David’s Bridal is the leader among the behemoths—it caters to more than two-thirds of all brides. David’s Bridal really wants to get you in the door, and promotes itself largely on convenience: If your bridal party is spread out across the country, there is likely a David’s Bridal shop somewhere in the neighborhood of each of your attendants, so getting the same dress for all your maids and matrons is logistically simplified. The company also maintains a lively Web site, that lets your fingers do a lot of the walking.

But before you go to David’s or any other salon, for that matter, take the time to imagine the gown of your dreams. The Perfect Wedding Dress by Philip Delamore and Weddings by Martha Stewart are beautifully written and illustrated books with lovely details on the history of gowns and other nuptial attire, and wonderful places to begin your search. Let your mind and eyes take in all the possibilities: Shall it be beaded satin, ruffled taffeta, or silk shantung that, transformed by the designer’s vision, expresses the feminine grace and beauty you will embody as you walk down the aisle? Consider all the options: Do you want to design your own wedding dress and commission it from a seamstress? Eleven percent of brides do. Is there a beautiful vintage gown in your family? Two percent of brides chose to wear a family heirloom gown. Another particularly talented 2 percent make their own!

On the practical side, keep these pointers in mind:
· You will know when you try on the gown of your dreams—it will seem perfect the minute you look in the mirror. Don’t however, try on any gowns without tags; you shouldn’t buy one of these, as it has no “documentation,” so why even try it in the first place?
· You probably don’t need the fancy undergarments—slips, strapless bras, garters, and other accoutrements—that many retailers will press upon you at the time you select your dress. These are high-profit items for all bridal shops and not worth the extra expense.
· Budget for all the line items associated with your gown, including dress and alterations, veil, shoes and hose, jewelry, accessories, and cleaning and preservation. Your veil or veils may cost nearly as much as your gown if you buy it (them) on impulse from a high-end salon. A beautiful veil is also one of the easiest items to make or borrow.
· Before visiting any bridal shop, small, medium, or gargantuan (such as David’s) check by telephone on the shop’s policies regarding refunds for deposits; damaged merchandise (what they will do if your gown is delivered with snags or spots a week before the wedding?); discontinued styles (several of my daughter’s maids almost ended up without dresses, as the style and color of the gowns selected was extremely popular and the manufacturer ran out of cloth); possible “browsing fees”; the costs of gown alterations (can they give you an estimate in advance, or do you just have to pay through the nose if the gown doesn’t fit?); sharing of customer information (will you end up on 100 mailing lists for wedding trinket vendors?) and so forth.
· If a salon will not make an appointment for you with a specific person who will work with your wedding party from ordering through alterations and cleaning, consider choosing another one.
· Consider setting a “dummy” wedding date two to four weeks before your actual wedding, and using this as the deadline in all your dealings with salons.

Getting Ready for a Wedding: The List

Yes, it's Elizabeth Taylor crying over the guest list in Father of the Bride

Did I mention in an earlier post that there are ups and downs in planning every wedding? I’m sure I did, and I’m back to tell you that one of the “downs” may very well be putting together the guest list.

Everyone has a stake in the guest list, and sometimes the interests of one party do not completely coincide with the interests of others: The bride and the groom naturally want their families at the wedding, but the bride’s idea of which family members must be invited may not agree with her mother’s and/or her father’s. Her parents, for example, are likely to have uncles, aunts, cousins and second cousins who feature much more prominently on the list of loved ones who should be in attendance than the bride may ever imagine. The bride’s mother is very likely to have old friends that she hopes to be included—the bride, and certainly the groom, may know little or nothing about the relationship between these friends and the mother-of-the-bride, though it is not unlikely to have included many intimate exchanges on the trials,

tribulations, and rewards of parenting these young people for decades leading up to the Big Day. The bride’s father may be eager to include his closest connections from school, business, or church—the retired pastor who baptized the bride-to-be (but with whom she has had little contact since childhood) for example, or the partner who paved the way for her acceptance to the college of her choice—and these individuals may not rank as high on the bride’s list. Together, the bride and groom may be thinking of the “party hearty” atmosphere they want to create at the reception, and wish to invite dozens of their contemporaries. Add to this the need to incorporate the wishes of the in-laws, and the assembly of a final guest list that makes everyone happy may be a formidable challenge indeed.

The conventional wisdom is a good starting point: Decide on the number of guests you can afford and work from there. If the bride’s family is financing the wedding, this number is set at their discretion, according to their budget, and the couple’s preferences as to the size of the crowd they wish to host. The bride’s family then decides on the specific number of guests from this total that may be accommodated from the groom’s family, and requests a guest list with titles, names, and addresses from the mother of the groom. If the groom’s family steps forward with an offer of financial participation, and a request that more guests be accommodated from their side of the family, the bride’s family is free, though not obligated, to expand the list at their request. Most guest lists break down into thirds: one-third for the bride’s family, one-third for the groom’s family, and a third for the bride and groom’s contemporaries.

There are protocols once the final number has been agreed upon: For example, if the bride or groom’s family invites one of the bride or groom’s aunts and uncles, it is considered polite to invite all of the maternal and paternal aunts and uncles. This tradition does not hold down the generational line, however: a bride or groom may invite one or more of his/her maternal/paternal cousins, without insult to other cousins who are not included.

Once the list is assembled, the mother-of-the-bride is responsible for ensuring that everyone on the groom’s family’s list is sent an invitation. She receives and collates the responses, and keeps the groom and his family up to date on who will attend. These responsibilities may fall to the bride, if she is organizing the wedding on her own. For the bride and groom, and new in-laws, the process of working on the guest list and keeping tabs on responses offers a welcome opportunity to get to know the wider family circle.

Professional wedding planners agree that approximately 70-75 percent of wedding invitations extended will be accepted. So, if you are shooting for a celebration with 100 guests, it is probably safe to assemble a list of 130 invitees. Some couples put together an A list, and a B list of guests; when they receive a decline from the A list, they mail an invitation from the B list. This is considered to be a risky practice: A guest on the B list may by chance ascertain his lower designation, and be insulted. The preferred practice is to invite everyone you truly wish to include in the celebration—up to 130 percent of the total that you would like to attend. The numbers are likely to settle just about where you want them.

Getting Ready for a Wedding: Make the Cake

When my daughter and I began thinking about the cake for her wedding, we were amazed to discover that upscale bakeries in the Washington, D.C. area were charging as much as $15 per slice for a fancily turned out wedding cake like the one shown above. The price tag for this option included a white or yellow base cake, fondant icing, a choice of one or more flavored fillings, and custom decorations. Take it from me, however, you can make a wedding cake yourself with a little practice, and put hundreds of dollars back into your pocket or into the wedding budget as a whole. Moreover, you can make a wedding cake tastier than anything your guests expect to be served, and you can make it weeks or months in advance and stash it in your freezer waiting for the big day.

In the interest of absolute honesty, I did not end up making the cake for my daughter's wedding. We found a talented local lady who supplied us with a beautiful product at a fraction of the cost of the high-end bakeries in town, and were happy to decorate it with fresh hydrangeas to match the wedding colors. But the initial sticker shock sent me scurrying around the library and the kitchen, and, after a bit of experimentation, I was convinced that it was a project well within the capabilities of the home baker with the right recipe and tools.

I found just the right recipe in First Steps to Cake Decorating by Janice Murfitt. This little volume supplies everything you need to know about choosing, sizing, baking, decorating, and storing a wedding cake. Murfitt's recipe for light fruit cake, flavored principally with sherry and allspice, is superb. It stores for three weeks in the cupboard and up to two months in the freezer. The ugly duckling picture above is a 12-inch round of the light fruit cake; we are still carving little slices from the chunk of it that has been in our kitchen freezer since March! Murfitt's excellent recipe for dark fruitcake, designed to be soaked in brandy, can be stored for a month on the shelf and indefinitely in the freezer with no loss of flavor.

Both the light fruit cake and the dark fruit cake are intended to be covered in a layer of marzipan (almond paste) before they are frosted and decorated with buttercream. The most difficult part of this operation is rolling the marzipan to a sufficient diameter to cover each layer of the cake. Once the marzipan is applied, however, it's a relative snap to frost the cake and add the final decorations with a pastry bag.

If you can make a pan of brownies you can make these cakes! Are you still hestitating? Think about making the layers yourself, and find a local baking "pro" who can add the marzipan, butttercream and custom decoration. This approach would still save Big Bucks.

Getting Ready for a Wedding: Ups & Downs

The lovely maids of the wedding party, arrayed like jewels in a bridal tiara.

Into each life some rain must fall. Indeed. And with every plan for a wedding, comes frustration, fatigue, misunderstandings, short tempers, and--it's best if you count on it--unhappiness. If you expect to get from the engagement to the honeymoon without getting stuck in an emotional rut, you will be disappointed. Budgets get bigger, daughters get distraught, bridesmaids get overbooked, fathers fritz, and mothers morph into Momzillas. So plan on it: getting ready for a wedding will bring boatloads of happiness into your life. But along the way, there will be days when you feel downright unhappy.

My advice to brides, mothers, and other participants falls into three categories:

1. The wedding is the bride's day. With her rests the choice of gown, venue, colors, flowers, music, food, and most other details. In European weddings 500 years ago, even the maidens of the bridal party were chosen as adornments to the bride, a boast of her home village--and received by the best man with a special toast to their beauty, as epitomized by the bride.
2. The wedding ceremony is a sacrament. This is also the day of the bride and groom, as they as joined by God as one flesh for the remainder of their lives on earth. Do everything to make them happy and keep them securely focused on this mystery (in the case of the bride, pray for her groom and his family, in the case of the groom, pray for his bride and her family).
3. Learn and follow the rules. There are rules for the bride, for the grooms, for the parents, for the maids, for the groomsman, and even for the guests. The mile-high pile of books on wedding planning lays them out pretty well. If you chose to participate in a wedding, get ready for it by learning the rules. Once you have learned the rules, follow them. They have been tried and tested by millions of brides, grooms, and their families over the centuries, and they work. They were, in fact, designed and modified to minimize wedding ups and downs, and keep everyone happy.

Getting Ready for a Wedding: Staging & Serving

Our talented day chef brought a talented helper, who spent several hours assembling the antepasto course.

Tick tock. As the weeks passed and our daughter's wedding drew closer, it became more and more apparent that no amount of advance work would prepare us to get through the Big Day without help. One of the wedding books stacked up on my bed table advised that good planning required a mental "walkthrough" of the events of the day, in great detail. When I went through this visualization exercise, I realized that, in fact, we required a small army. To process the food we planned to serve our guests (slicing, cutting, chopping, wrapping, defrosting), we needed three food preparation helpers for the day before the wedding. To handle the crowd of more than 150 on the day of, we needed a day chef, two sous chefs, two bartenders, and five servers. This was on top of the disk jockey, the volunteer parking attendants, a house helper in charge of clearing away rubble, attending to house guests, and locating items for the chef in the kitchen, and the teenagers assigned to watching over the babies and toddlers while their parents joined the celebration.

For those of you considering a do-it-yourself wedding to save money, I can report that the cost of this labor power for the final staging and serving (of drinks, appetizers, dinner, and dessert) cost as much as the food, cake, and wine we purchased. So, when you do your budget projections, make sure to take this into consideration. More on what I learned about wedding budgets is to come.

Getting Ready for a Wedding: The Bridal Tea

Martha Stewart's early 1980s book Hors D'Oeuvres was the inspiration for my daughter's wedding shower, which we did as a high tea. Her book has a gorgeous chapter titled "Tea Party in the Library."

I wanted my daughter's wedding shower to be a delicious and relaxing afternoon for her bridal attendants, her friends, and the several of my old friends who had seen her grow up. We settled on the idea of having high tea, a celebration we had done together as mother and daughter several times in the past, including the Mother and Daughter Tea for her high school. The menu consisted of two courses: a savory course of tea sandwiches, stuffed cherry tomatoes, and quiche (provided by a friend who makes the best), and sweets, the traditional scones with clotted cream, raspberry and apricot thumbprint cookies, and trifle. Four generations of well wishers and family were on hand for the lovely event.

The menu was:

Mimosa punch

Variety of teas
Savories
Cucumber sandwiches on white bread
Curried chicken tea sandwiches on pumpernickel bread
Strawberry walnut tea sandwiches on cinnamon raisin bread
Cherry tomatoes stuffed with salmon mousse
Cheese quiche
Sweets
Tea with lemon, cream, and sanded sugar
Thumbprint cookies with apricot and strawberry jam
Scones with clotted cream and raspberry jam
Mocha chocolate torte

I am happy to share recipes. Please ask.

Getting Ready for a Wedding: Mass Production

We made 150 heart-shaped cookies using sanding sugar and dragees, with a purple and lavendar theme to reflect the wedding colors

One of the first decisions we made about the wedding was to prepare the food ourselves. The task consisted largely of assembling the ingredients and all of the serving dishes and implements: We were completely confident of the recipes, which were all tried and true family favorites.

The menu we decided on was:

Appetizers

Assorted cheeses with fruit & crackers

Garlic rusk with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes
Miniature chicken kabobs

Baked brie en croute

Pesto dip with cherry tomatoes

Melon wrapped in prosciutto

Mixed nuts

Cheese straws

Main Course

Antipasto selection

Artichoke & caper lasagna with white sauce

Sausage and pepper lasagna with red sauce

Rosemary foccaccio with olive oil dipping sauce

Bread sticks

Home made rolls and butter

White wine

Red wine

Sweets course

Mexican wedding cookies

Iced butter cookies

Truffles & other chocolates

Dessert

Wedding cake

This was an ambitious project, as we were counting on 150 guests, but there was no way to serve a full meal with some elegant touches within our budget unless we took on the basic cooking ourselves. Over all, it took eight weekends for the preparation of 17 pans of lasagna, 400 cookies, and 600 cheese straws, all of which were safely tucked into the basement freezer, and the freezer of a used refrigerator we purchased and stashed in the garage, by mid-summer. All went extremely well--until the power went out for three days! (But that's another story, involving our friend Corky's generator and round-the-clock trips to the back yard to keep in going.)

All of our frozen foods were well received at the reception. I think it's fair to pronounce our recipes top-notch for advanced preparation and freezing. I would be happy to share any or all.

Plating the food and serving the guests were both separate tasks--requiring just as much preparation as the cooking, and also great adventures.

Getting Ready for a Wedding (Continued)

A stunning depiction of the Wedding Feast at Cana by the Flemish master Gerard David (1500). Even this lavish representation of Christ's first public miracle, however, pales in comparison to Jesus’s description of the event in Anne Rice's The Road to Cana.

I was so fortunate to be reading Anne Rice’s new book, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, right in the middle of the preparations for my daughter's October 2008 wedding. More than once, it provided me with a much-needed reminder of what weddings are actually all about, and why human beings in all cultures put aside daily chores and cares to sing, dance, eat and drink with brides and grooms and their families. At the altar, the bride and groom face one another and pledge to be united “until death us do part.” They enter the marital embrace, (which in Christian cultures symbolizes the love of Christ for his Church, and in all human cultures has been invested with religious overtones), and become one flesh. The marital embrace is a physical testimony of the love of God for each human being, and each individual act of marital love is a transcendental act, invested with the capability to forever change all of human history with the creation of a new human soul—a child. Our culture spends the time and care on no other celebration that it does on weddings (which can rightly absorb the attention of an entire family for months), and this is as it should be. For all who participate and attend, and above all for the bride and groom, the wedding reminds us that God (whose love made Him a Creator), has poured His love into man and woman to make them co-creators with Him. At every wedding, we celebrate the mystery of the divine creative capacity hidden within each man and woman. Why was Road to Cana such a delight during our wedding planning months? It taught me that God loves weddings! A lovely detail of the plot is that the young Jesus (who tells the story in the first person) instructs his family to use his long-hidden birthday gifts from the Magi to finance the wedding of a local girl abandoned by her father. This girl is no stranger or mere neighbor to him: She is the woman He loves and would have chosen as His wife if the Father’s call had been to marriage rather than Calvary. Rice’s description of the wedding brought tears to my eyes:

Under the high ceilings of the house, the music exploded… Huge tables had been set throughout all the main rooms. Through the open doorways, we saw great tents spanning the soft grass, and carpets spread everywhere, and table at which everyone might gather, either on couches or right on the rugs, whichever they desired. Amid all, the candelabra burned with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny flames… Great platters of food appeared, steam rising from the roasted lamb, the glistening fruit, the hot spiced cakes and honey cakes, the piles of raisons and dates and nuts…. The music and the aromas of the rich platters melded and it seemed for a moment to me that—as I stood in the courtyard, in the very middle of it, staring from one feasting group to another…--I was in a great unbroken universe of pure happiness which no evil could ever approach.

In this setting, Jesus performs his first public miracle, and makes a gift of water turned to wine to the celebrating couple. The dancing, eating, drinking, and celebrating go on!

So, God loves weddings. When you are fussing over buttons on bustles, finding the perfect petit fours, and just the right bottle of bubbly for the toast, you are actually creating a Feast of Love that brings happiness to many, and above all, the Father of Love.

Getting Ready for a Wedding

The happy couple with a groomsman and maid of honor

We just had a wedding (our daughter's) at our house--literally, under a tent on the side lawn--and I hope to be writing more about this wonderful event in the future. At this point, I don't have time to write as much as I would like, as we are now getting ready for a second wedding (our son's), though the season and the couple's preferences have sited this happy event at an old mansion in West Virginia. But I feel compelled to offer a bit of advice to mothers and brides-to-be, just in case there are readers facing wedding preps who find their ways to this blog. That advice is: There is no such thing as over-planning for a wedding. Trust me: weddings require an attention to detail unsurpassed by any other celebratory event in human history; whether small, medium, large, or grandiose, they require the proverbial cast of thousands (well, literally, hundreds or dozens) of behind-the scenes helpers and heros to carry out, and everything takes more time and costs more money than you are likely to anticipate. Hosting a wedding for 100 people is not the equivalent of giving a buffet dinner for the same crowd. A special note to mothers of brides-to-be: Do not let anyone--be it your dear spouse, a nervous bride, a kindly aunt, a concerned friend--tell you that you are overdoing the lists, research, index cards, and other planning. You will likely become fixated on fabric, flowers, pew ribbons, cake fillings, and ceremony formats: Relax and enjoy the fact that you can think about little else.

Finally, there are hundreds of wedding books and Web sites out there. They do not all agree, even on some of the etiquette fundamentals. I highly recommended starting with two: Weddings by Martha Stewart, the first of her books on weddings, which has lovely essays and gives you lots of ideas of how to go over the top if you have the financial means to do so, and Bride's Book of Etiquette, by the editors of Brides magazine. The second title has a good table of contents, a helpful index, and doesn't omit any of the crucial etiquette topics that you will have to deal with.

Happy wedding planning! It's great fun!