My Hastily Put-Together Wedding

For most people, the wedding planning process takes anywhere from one to two years. A fast wedding is six to eight months. My courtship, however, was whirlwind and my husband and I weren’t into eloping. So it was necessary to put something together in a hurry. We had two months to get it all together. Luckily, we married in December and that meant that there wasn’t as much competition for photo sittings for the engagement photos and ordering invitations.

One of the advantages of having to plan a wedding that quickly is that you don’t have time to worry about what you are going to do. You just have to do it. The first thing to do was to arrange for invitations and a photo sitting. We did this first, and then worked on everything else while waiting for the finished invitations. And, in today’s digital world, we were able to look at our poses almost immediately and choose what we liked best.

We chose a studio that provided printing services so we could choose our invitations the same day we had our sitting. We did have to pay a little extra to expedite the printing so that we could have them in time to send out, though. Computer-printed address labels sped up the addressing process when that time came (although we could have had printed envelopes).

The theme, since we didn’t have time for grand arrangements, was “simple elegance.” My wedding dress was simple, and my bridesmaid dresses were simple. All of our decorations were simple as well. We wanted a cheap wedding, too. For both receptions (my husband and I are from opposite sides of the country) we made use of local church cultural halls. It didn’t cost anything, and was rather easy to decorate. The only real scheduling issue was the live music for the reception in my hometown. We contacted a local jazz trio and scheduled them five weeks in advance.

Cakes can be hard to get on short notice, but for our New York reception we simple had a nice cake offered at the grocery store (cost: $15). For the Idaho reception, only the top layer (the small layer) was real cake. Everything else was constructed from Styrofoam and decorated with special frosting. It was a small, yet elegant cake, that didn’t take very long for one of my mom’s friends to make (as her wedding gift). By borrowing whicker backgrounds, we managed to add elegance without a great deal of decorating. Additionally, we brought our own white table clothes (very cheap) and put wedding-color fabric over them to add color. Our centerpieces were simple and made by us.

The food was also provided by us. We bought chocolates in bulk and bite-sized cheesecakes. We even made gallons of our own punch. Everything was laid out self-serve style (so we didn’t have to worry about catering a big dinner), and the live music for dancing made up for the lack of a formal dinner. Since we didn’t have to schedule a lot, or sit down with planners, we managed to have a very nice wedding (and two receptions!) with only two months’ time to plan.