jaseroque's Full Review: Kathleen Kennedy - Priceless Weddings for Under $5...
I got engaged in January, 2001. After several weeks enjoying our new situation, I decided that it might be a good idea to start thinking about planning some sort of wedding! I didn’t want a big bash -- my fiancé and I are both understated, quiet people, and we’re paying for this ourselves -- so we wanted something small and simple and inexpensive. This, I thought, shouldn’t be too hard.
Boy, was I wrong.
First I went online. There are thousands of wedding web sites out there, on every conceivable aspect of a wedding. And in this jungle of white and pink, most of the emphasis was on spending a lot of money. A huge amount of money. The average American wedding these days appears to cost around $15,000-$19,000.
The angle taken by these bridal web sites was the same everywhere: you, the bride, have been dreaming of an enormous princess wedding all your life, and we can make it happen! These places are in the business of stripmining your most extravagant dreams, or, if you don’t have such dreams, of putting them in your head. I spent most of my teenage years dreaming of a 4x4 with a winch on front, full of equipment to study animals in the wild. Honestly, I never gave my bridal gown a thought until I came to plan the wedding.
Then these sites subtly suggest that if you don’t buy every wedding accessory (like a cake knife corsage) or if every detail isn’t in place (e.g. your reception flowers don’t match the wallpaper) the wedding will be a disaster.
It was an immense information overload. I fled the house and ran into the nearest bookstore to find some more targeted, manageable information. I ran my hand over the bridal shelf and pulled out book after book, and my heart sank. Most of these books were like the internet sites: bent on squeezing money out of you. Most advised that the first step you should do in planning a wedding was to hire a wedding consultant. No surprise, most of these books were written by wedding consultants.
Then a title caught my eye further along the shelf: “Priceless Weddings for under $5,000” by Kathleen Kennedy. I grabbed it. The first paragraph of the introduction captured my feelings exactly. In it, the author described how she went to the bookstore to look for wedding planning books, and was deeply discouraged to discover that most books entailed spending a small fortune on the wedding.
I bought the book, took it home, and curled up with it on the couch.
I was immensely relieved and soothed to find a like minded author. Early in the book, she asks that the bride and groom sit down and list five top priorities for what they want their wedding to be like. Then, they should refer to these priorities during the wedding planning to help keep them on course, to keep unimportant things from crowding in. She then asks the bride and groom to make a budget and stick to it.
Kennedy has a chapter on each of the major parts of the wedding planning: choosing a location, buying a dress, catering food (including a chapter on how to cater your own wedding -- she's a caterer), photography, entertainment, and flowers. She also has a chapter on vows, the pros and cons of eloping, and final planning steps.
In each chapter, she has advice on how to make the various decisions about each of these stages, and information on options that are less costly. For example, when choosing a reception site, she points out that you can have a reception at just about any time of day, and that a morning breakfast reception would cost much less than a sit down dinner. I didn’t even know that breakfast receptions were an option! She also has all sorts of good ideas about where to find less expensive venues -- state parks, for example, or the grounds of a campus. We used one of her ideas and will hold our wedding at a historic site, for a fraction of the cost of holding it in a restaurant.
In the flower chapter, she points out that you can decorate a table with leaves or branches of blossoms from fruit trees, or dried herb bunches -- all less expensive than the imposing, pastel cascades of most wedding flower arrangements. For a bridal bouquet, a single elegant flower can be less expensive than a full bouquet, and stunningly elegant in the bargain!
The chapters also include checklists of what to ask the different vendors -- questions about deposits, cancellation policies, and contracts. These lists were so helpful I copied some of them out and modified them to use in our own interviews with vendors.
The book is brimming with good ideas like this. Just as importantly, it is a morale booster -- it showed me that I can have a small, inexpensive wedding that is still beautiful and personal and memorable. And I am hoping that because the wedding will be simple, we’ll have more time and attention to focus on what is truly important to us -- each other, and our family and close friends.
Kennedy illustrates her tips with stories from real weddings -- the priority list of a bride and groom, their budget, and how they pulled it off. These stories were very helpful and fun to read, and gave me ideas about how to be creative with our wedding. From the couple who got married in a barn, to the bride who wore a 1913 vintage dress purchased for a song, to the couple who recorded their own music onto CDs, the book is full of creative wedding stories.
I found only one downside to her book. To get all these weddings under $5,000, most of the couples were able to get at least one major service for free from friends. They’d have a musical friend play during the ceremony, or they’d have a shutterbug uncle take all the photographs. Some had good cooks in the family who did the catering as a gift.
Free catering and free photography are the *real* cost saving ideas in this book. Professional catering and professional photography can cost thousands of dollars each. Only by getting these services for free were many of the weddings described in the book kept under $5,000.
My fiancé and I are not able or comfortable asking friends or family to perform such major services for us -- ours is a destination wedding, requiring everyone to travel, and in any case we want our guests to be guests.
My mother catered my two sisters' weddings herself twenty years ago, and was so exhausted and stressed from the experience that she vowed never to do it again, nor would I think of asking her to do this. I’d rather she just come, carefree, and have a great time.
Kennedy’s weddings rely on such favors to meet their budget. If you can’t or don’t want to call on such favors from friends and family, your wedding will cost more.
Discover how to to create personal, memorable, and first-rate wedding ceremonies that don t mean beginning married life deep in debt. This invaluable ...More at Buy.com
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