how to plan a relaxed wedding day

Your wedding day is a huge event that involves lots of planning, multiple vendors and friends and family from all over the place coming to celebrate you. Even if you’re planning a micro-wedding, there are so many minute details that you don’t anticipate that can interrupt the festivities of your day. As much fun as it is to see everyone, your wedding day can also cause stress, especially if you’re already prone to anxious feelings. Fortunately, your special day doesn’t have to be stressful. In the midst of the craze of the pandemic, Sarah and Robert decided that they were not going to let the shut-down dampen their merriment and decided to get married anyway.  Their wedding exemplified the concept of a relaxed wedding day.

Here are my top 5 tips for keeping things relaxed on your wedding day!

1. Invest in a professional wedding planner or coordinator

2. Chose vendors that you love and trust

3. Add buffer time into your schedule

4. Consider doing a first look

5. Keep everyone in the know

 Invest in a professional wedding planner or coordinator

The biggest thing you can do to ease your wedding stress is to hire a professional planner or day-of coordinator. Odds are, you’re getting married for the first time and you’re not planning to do this again. Unless you’re in the wedding business, there are many aspects of weddings that you’re just not familiar with. The whole job of a professional planner is to handle all the details, from ensuring your wedding party is lined up and ready to walk down the aisle to making sure your day stays on schedule and goes off without a hitch. A coordinator can even help set up and coordinate your vendors. Basically, they do anything necessary behind the scenes to make sure that your wedding day is as flawless as possible. If you can afford a planner or coordinator in your budget, it’s definitely worth the investment.

For Sarah and Robert’s wedding, they decided to hire a professional service to handle the zoom portion of their wedding. This service provided the couple and their online guests a great way to manage all the zoom conference. It was very impressive! The service moderated the service online and kept everyone connected and managed all the breakout rooms. It was fabulous!

Choose vendors you love and trust

You have a vision for your wedding day, and to ensure that you make that vision a reality, it’s essential to hire vendors you can trust to meet—and even exceed—your expectations. If you meet a photographer or florist whose personality just meshes with yours and who completely understands what you’re going for, book them ASAP! While you should definitely do plenty of research on all your potential vendors, don’t be afraid to trust your gut as well. For their flowers and wedding cake, Sarah went with the vendors that she was familiar with and had used before. The couples’ flowers were provided by Copper Penny Flowers based in Concord MA. Her wedding cake was made by her aunt.

Add buffer time into your schedule

One of the biggest mistakes couples make is failing to give themselves enough time to get ready, take group photos and otherwise leave space for events during their wedding day. While everyone will try their hardest to go on schedule, minor issues are bound to crop up and your wedding day likely won’t stick to your carefully detailed timetable. That’s why you should always schedule some extra buffer time to ensure that going a little over your allotted time won’t completely throw off your whole day.

Consider doing a first look

A lot of the nerves couples feel on the wedding day come from not seeing each other. After all, who better to comfort you than your best friend? While it’s totally fine to stick to tradition and wait to see each other for the first time when you walk down the aisle, don’t be afraid to consider a first look, especially if you know you’ll be feeling nervous. Nerves are absolutely normal, and seeing your partner before your ceremony can do a lot to ease those anxious feelings and get you both smiling and ready to say “I do.” Sarah and Robert had a “first look” earlier on in the day. I put first look in quotation marks because this couple got ready together. They chose to have their formal portrait session ahead of the ceremony so they would have plenty of time for their guests after the ceremony.

Wanna learn more about first looks? Check out my prior blogpost HERE

Keep everyone in the know

You definitely don’t want your guests asking you a hundred questions on your wedding day, so be sure to do your best to keep everyone informed. This is where a wedding website comes in super handy! You can provide directions to your venue, information about your reception and anything else your guests need to know. It also doesn’t hurt to have a specific person who people can go to for any additional questions, so they don’t text and call you or your partner when you’re just trying to prepare for your big day.

 Bonus tip! 

Go with the flow

The best thing you can do to keep your wedding day stress-free? Accept that something will go wrong. Your day likely won’t be completely perfect, but remember that you can’t control every little thing and just take the mistakes in stride. Do your best to enjoy each moment as it comes and remember what your wedding day is truly about: celebrating the love that you and your partner share. For this lovely couple, in spite of the sunny forecast at the start of the day, the skies suddenly clouded over and they were suddenly doused in showers.

Sarah and Robert were troopers - their smiles never dimmed and the celebratory activities never paused! it was a great day.