Tuesday, December 2, 2008

My Big Fat REAL Wedding - Date & Location

Lesson #1.
It is all about making your guests’ lives easier. Suck it up.


My Hip Husband and I got engaged on my birthday – March 3, 2007. It was so amazing and we were just glowing with excitement. But when we first shared the news with all of our friends and family, what was the first thing that they asked?

“Do you have a date?”

Thus with barely anytime to absorb how amazing it is to be a “fiancé”, we were starting to compromise…I mean plan. You see, Sean and I live in NYC. About 75% of our guests live in the Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan). The other 25% are scattered throughout the US. So even though it would have saved us so many flights, we decided to have our big she-bang in Chicago. It’s a main airport hub for many airlines. It’s drivable for our Midwestern crew. It’s also a really fun city.



Now, I have made it no secret that I hate to be too hot or too cold (75 degrees and sunny, people!), so that narrowed our possible months to May/early June or September-ish. Ideally we would work with a 3 day weekend to give our family maximum party and recovery time (we are not a reserved group).

For our venue, I did countless hours of online research looking for anything that didn’t look like too stodgy or didn’t have hideous carpet. I then found A New Leaf, which is now pretty well known. But at the time, it was a breath of fresh air to me in my search. I took the only weekend day that they had available in my set criteria and ended up with August 31, 2008 – the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. I was now getting married in a city far from convenient on a date that made me a perpetual fiancé, but I learned my lesson…it’s all about your guests. --a


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