ManagingMoney.com, August 8th, 2007
Do you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a memorable wedding reception? Thankfully, the answer is no. You can have a glorious garden reception at your home or the home of a family or friend if the area is more suitable, for a fraction of the cost of a commercial reception venue.
The most important thing to remember with a budget wedding reception is to limit the number of guests to no more than 100, less being better. You don't actually have to send a wedding invite to everyone you know, if the number runs into hundreds. The actual number you decide on will depend on the size of the venue. Better to have a smaller number comfortably mingling, than a huge number crushed shoulder to shoulder.
Even if the weather looks fine, some shade will be appropriate. The cheap canopies available at most discount stores for shading cars and other backyard purposes will do fine. You will need at least one for the cake and the buffet, which should be placed under cover. You can get these in white, and decorate them with swathes of inexpensive curtain material or netting from a fabric store. Add bunches of dollar store fake flowers and you will have a bower fit for a princess bride.
Rent the furniture rather than buy. You can get good rates for wedding buffet tables and chairs, and these will usually be designed just for a wedding, so you won't need to add anything but the food and a centerpiece for the tables.
Turn your crafty hand (or your friends' hands) to creating unique centerpieces. Plain white candles surrounded by white stones or large pearl beads look striking and elegant. Paint clay flowerpots white and fill them with fake daisies. Create unique floral displays with white fake flowers, grasses and ferns sprayed white, and butterflies on sticks.
Turn your printer to good use for wedding invitations and place markers. You can buy invitation paper ready for printing with envelopes, and it will be much cheaper than having them printed. Your invitations can look exactly as you imagine them, with free fonts from the internet and a personal photo, for a fraction of the cost. The internet will also provide printable templates - just Google "free printables+wedding" and see what you find.
Keep the food simple and portable and you will save on place settings and chairs for sit down dining. Delicious easy to prepare nibbles always goes down well. You can rope friends and family in to help prepare the food a day or two ahead. You will need to work out the portions per guests so you will know how much raw materials to order. For example, if you are having 50 guests, work out two or three chicken wings per guest. That's 100-150 chicken wings. The food doesn't have to be fancy. Big bowls of pasta and potato salad, dips and chips, cocktail franks, cheeses and fresh fruit will look inviting.
The cake is the high spot of any reception, and you can splurge on a bought one, or make it yourself. Just remember that there should be enough to go around. Not everyone is mad about fruit cake or chocolate mud, so why not take one frugal bride's tip and have three different luscious cakes? Place them on a cake tier or use polystyrene blocks covered with drapes of fabric, each a little higher than the next, for an elegant display. The one at the top - which the bride and groom cut - will naturally be their favorite choice.
Music for your reception can be from your personal CD collections. But rather than have someone play DJ all the time, play whole CDs of music appropriate to your theme or tastes. Ambient music is beautiful at a garden reception and the CDs can be loaded into the player and left to themselves. Later, when people want to break loose and have fun, you can put on pop music or rock collections. Make sure you have someone to play the Bride and Groom's first dance on time though - a nice little job for the Best Man.
You don't need a professional to produce great photographs and videos either. Buy a good camera and give it to the best photographer you know for the day. What matters are the memories, not that it cost a bomb to have those memories snapped and printed.
The great thing about a simple, low cost wedding reception is that it becomes a real family and friends affair, and the bride and groom get to enjoy it as much as everyone else. Best of all, you start your married life without a crippling debt, or a state of poverty because you spent too much on the reception.
