Planning an outside wedding wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. In fact, it didn’t cost as much as an indoor wedding would have cost us. Since we had the beauty of nature all around us, it wasn’t too expensive to decorate. I checked out a lot of places to have our summer wedding and reception. Instead of having our wedding ceremony and reception on the beach or in a garden, I chose to have it in the park. I found several perfect parks that would work fine for our wedding day.
Since I never planned a wedding like this before, I needed all the help I could get. When you plan to be married in the great outdoors, it seems you have to have a backup plan just in case the weather turns from sunny to pouring buckets. So we arranged to have a tent set up to move the ceremony into if necessary, just as a precaution.
We had canopies arranged for our reception and barring bad weather, planned to be wed under a lovely trellis. The only real decorations I needed were those for my wedding table and the guests reception tables. With the park as our main theme, I basically had to make sure I had our table settings and maybe throw in a few extra bouquets of flowers. I decided to go with artificial flowers because I didn’t want to have our wedding to be the target of a bee swarm. The flowers were absolutely gorgeous and didn’t look artificial at all. Planning this wedding wasn’t all that hard, but there was a little more than I expected. Like, making sure there were citronella candles all around, rest rooms close by and making sure our cake was kept cool until ready to be cut.
There was a variety of accessories available for the outdoor reception. As centerpieces for our reception tables I used citronella votive candles and place them in glass globes with flowers around them, and used park bench place card holders for each guest. For each of our guests there were beautiful chrome bottle openers in lovely designed favor boxes, as a summer wedding favor. For our wedding table, of course, was our fabulous wedding cake with a very unique wedding cake topper.
I saw this cake topper when I was checking out all the wedding accessories they had to offer, and I knew this was the topper I wanted. They were especially customized for the bride and groom. All I had to do was send in a head shot picture of me and my fiance and they custom made a bride and groom cake topper with our faces. Talk about the best wedding keepsake you can get. Our friends and family were really loved the cake topper and gave us a lot of compliments on it. Our crystal champagne flutes and silver cake serving set was just a few of the fantastic accessories I ordered for our ceremony and reception. You wouldn’t believe all the nice accessories you can buy online.
It was the perfect wedding and reception, just like I had hoped for. Thank goodness the weather stayed perfect throughout the entire ceremony and reception and we never had to put plan B into action. The DJ we hired was really exceptional and I’m sure that the music played on long after my new husband and I left for our honeymoon. A lot of good things were said about our wedding ceremony and everyone said they had a fantastic time at the reception. The park turned out to be the perfect place to have our wedding and reception. I’d love to do this again and have a wedding renewal in the park, maybe for an anniversary, someday.