Our Top Tips for Planning a Magical Winter Wedding
Welcome to October, wedding planners!
For this blog, we thought we’d continue our theme from earlier this month and focus our attention once again on glorious winter weddings.
As we mentioned in last week’s blog, we’re seeing a huge upward surge in happy couples looking for awesome wedding entertainment for celebrations in the winter months – and we totally understand the appeal. The festive good will of the Christmas period can elevate the already wonderful atmosphere of a wedding day to something totally unique and unforgettable.
However, Christmas weddings present a whole new minefield of logistical issues that need to be navigated before the big day. So much so, you can be forgiven for feeling a little bit lost in the midst of it all before you dive in! Well we thought we’d go ahead and help with that.
So here we present a few of our top tips for planning a Christmas wedding. Cause we’re nice like that.
Let’s get cracking!
Choose a date early – and let your guests know ASAP!
When choosing a day for your wedding, we always recommend to our clients to start with three potential dates. This gives you maximum flexibility with your first-choice venue and suppliers. However, Christmas presents and even tighter timeline than the summer season, and venues get booked out remarkably quickly. For this reason, we recommend booking your chosen venue as early as possible. What’s more, Christmas is likely to be a busy, travel-intensive time for all your guests. With this in mind, be sure to get your save the dates out early – at least six months before the big day!
Find a winter-appropriate wedding venue.
This is one of our biggest, most crucial top tips for planning a Christmas wedding. It probably goes without saying, but it’s worth saying all the same. Some summer wedding venues just don’t work for a winter wedding. Rural summer weddings in marquees and tepees can be genuinely magical but transfer that setting to the winter and it’s not just the cold and the rain that you have to contend with.
Long nights, short days and inclement weather don’t lend themselves well to weddings in a single-room venue – you need to make sure your winter wedding venue has somewhere with a comfortable ‘break out’ space for your guests to spend time whilst rooms are reset during the day. What’s more, be cautious of venues that require field-parking or guests walking across open grass to enter and exit the venue or reach toilet facilities – it’s very easy for this to cause problems with muddy dresses and stranded vehicles that you don’t want to deal with on your wedding day!
Christmas weddings can, in fact, open a whole new avenue of opportunities for your wedding venue. Grand manor houses with roaring fireplaces, cosy boutique hotels and contemporary city centre spaces like art galleries and museums are all great options for Christmas venues. For a little more help finding that perfect venue, we asked some of our wedding bands in Devon to pick their favourite winter wedding locations. You can read all about that in our blog here – WINTER WEDDINGS - OUR TOP FIVE WEDDING VENUES IN THE SOUTH WEST
Make the most of your Christmas theme
Planning a wedding in the festive season really helps to narrow down your wedding theme. It’s a great opportunity to embrace all things Christmas with your wedding planning. Bold reds, greens and golds make for a wonderfully festive and flattering colour palate. Party favours can have a Christmas theme – from candy canes for the kids to little bottles of port or brandy for the adults. You can even go with festive table names and, of course, crackers and hats are an absolute must!
Dining options jump out at you without even thinking – Christmas cakes, warming winter canapes and festive cocktails are all great options. However, for the wedding breakfast its sometimes nice to think outside the box. One of our wedding bands in Bristol, the fabulous Festival Nights, gave us this food for thought –
‘Most couples at Christmas weddings tend to go for Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. But we played one wedding at Pynes House last Christmas where the couple went against this idea and offered banquet-style sharing boards of chicken and lamb instead. It managed to keep the festive feel without going overkill on the Turkey!’
Think about a Christmas tree centrepiece for your venue
We saw this at one wedding last winter and absolutely fell in love with it. The happy couple had a large 15ft Christmas tree in the centre of their wedding reception. They asked all their guests to bring a tree ornament as a gift to the married couple. And now, every Christmas, the couple get to decorate their own Christmas tree at home with memories from their wedding day. That sounds just about perfect to us!
Get the music right!
Any great wedding band worth their salt has a few Christmas songs in their repertoire that make their way into the setlist during the Christmas wedding and party season! However, if you want to keep that festive vibe rolling with you wedding entertainment, here are two options for you to consider. The
Vintage swing bands compliment a Christmas wedding perfectly, and there’s none better than this toe tapping South Wales wedding band. Not only does their sound and style lend itself perfectly to the festive aesthetic, they’ll also have you and your guests up and dancing from first song to last.
Sticking with the vintage vibe, post-modern jukebox bands offer a great mix of festive vintage sound and style with contemporary pop songs thrown in. Gatsby’s Jukebox play everything from Britney to Beyoncé in the style of a roaring 20’s speakeasy band… they may even throw in a bit of Slade for good measure!
So there you have it - top tips for planning a Christmas wedding, courtesy of your friends at Tailored Entertainment. For more help, advice, or to book yourself a Tailored act for your Christmas wedding, give us a call. We can’t wait to hear from you!
