Choosing a theme for your wedding can be overwhelming and quite confusing. So where do you begin, and why do you need a theme anyway?
A theme can make your life and decision making so much easier! For instance if you know you love pink and teal, you don’t even have to think about what colors to choose for the flowers. If you know what kind of cake you love, you don’t have to spend hours taste testing 1,000 different kinds of cake. A theme can take the agony of decision making out of the picture completely.
In the movie “Father of the Bride” there is a great scene where Martin Short is hired as the wedding coordinator. When told that the wedding is in six months he said – “ Six month, dat not much time…..I think we begin with da cake.”
He chose one thing as his focal point and built the wedding around it. Finding your wedding theme is no more difficult than that. It doesn’t have to be based around the cake obviously, but your theme can come from many different thoughts and images such as:
Personality – If you had to use one personality trait to describe yourself and another to describe your future mate, what would those words be? This is always a great jumping off point for a theme. If I had to describe personality traits for my husband and me it would be adventurer and lover of beauty. So an outdoor wedding in a garden or in the forest might be just the ticket. Just two words can give you a great place to start your theme creation.
Style – You can do the same thing in choosing a style. What word best describes your overall style in life? What word best describes your future spouse’s style? Are you vintage, classic, modern, quirky, or something in between?
Things – What kinds of things do you each love? Do you have favorite colors? You can possibly use those as your choices for the wedding colors. Do you have favorite movies, or better yet one favorite movie? If so, you can build a theme around that…..a Star Wars Wedding, or A Great Gatsby Wedding for example. What about favorite books, festivals, fairy tales, or cartoons? The ideas here are endless.
Flowers – When you think about your wedding day, what do the flowers look like in your imagination? Are they large bouquets of garden flowers, or are they more classic “wedding style”? Are the colors more bohemian, or are they monochromatic modern? Just thinking about the flowers can give you an idea of the things you prefer.
Ceremony – What kind of ceremony have you always dreamed of? Will it be a traditional service held in your place of worship, will it be more non-traditional, or will it be a full fledged expression of your cultural heritage?
Location – So where will your wedding be held? What have you always imagined it to be? Will it be in a glamorous ballroom, a traditional church setting, an outdoor venue, or a destination wedding? These thoughts can also be clues to your wedding theme. For instance, if you are choosing a destination wedding, you can always pick up a theme based on the location to which you are traveling. Love in Paris, Under the Tuscan Sun, etc.
Food – What kind of food have you always envisioned? Will it be a fancy dessert bar, appetizers, ethnic foods, tapas, or a four course meal?
So now that you have some ideas of jumping off points for your wedding theme, you can start to bring all of the pieces together so you can “tell your love story with music”, which I will discuss in my next post