How to Plan a Successful Mormon Wedding
Weddings are important events, especially when you’re planning a marriage for time and all eternity. If you just started planning a Mormon wedding, make sure you follow these three tips:
Focus on What Really Matters
Weddings tend to be complicated affairs purely because of the number of people involved and the importance of the event. Things will go wrong.
Your whole wedding party will get doused by rogue sprinklers during pictures. An unexpected amount of traffic will make you an hour late to your own reception. During an important moment, your DJ will play the one song that you specifically asked him to not play. A friend with whom you’ve lost touch will show up and badmouth your religion to your other guests.
These are all things that actually happened at my wedding. And it was a perfect day.
Because there’s only one thing that absolutely needs to happen for your wedding day to be successful: You get married.
Really, that’s it.
Decide now that as long as you get married, your wedding day was a success. Remind yourself of that when things go wrong. All those mishaps won’t matter in the long run — but they will make great stories one day.
Plan According to Your Priorities
Remember the most important part? Start there — make sure you have a place to get married.
If you’re getting married in the temple, schedule the temple, your endowment (if you haven’t received it already), and the necessary interview with your bishop and stake president. Start the process now — you don’t want to send out invitations and then find out the temple isn’t available.
Once you’ve taken care of planning the ceremony, decide with your future spouse what’s most important to you.
My husband really wanted to serve great food at our reception. I really wanted to have lots of pictures to remember the day. Therefore, we spent most of our time and money on food and photography.
Spend yours on what matters most to you, too.
Get Organized
A lot of the elements of a Mormon wedding can take weeks or even months to plan.
For example, think of invitations.
You need to give your guests plenty of advance notice, so let’s say you want to send the invitations two months in advance. Maybe it will take 10 business days to receive the invitations from the printer, so you’ll order them two weeks ahead of time to be safe. And you’ll need to address all the invitations, so add another week. That means you’ll probably want to start shopping for invitations no later than 13 weeks before the wedding.
But you’ll need to know the venue and the time of the event before you can send out invitations. And if you want to include engagement photos on the invitations, you’ll need to find a photographer and schedule a photoshoot, allowing plenty of time before the invitations are printed.
It’s easy to see how messy things can get if you haven’t thought ahead.
Use the following graphic as a guideline for your Mormon wedding planning timetable:
…and here’s some good information about ring ceremonies outside the temple.
Share your wedding planning experiences in the comments: