Wait, food doesn't count as decor?... I've apparently been doing it wrong all these Thanksgivings. (assumption: if the table is entirely covered with delicious food, who needs centerpieces?... relatedly, who has *room* for centerpieces if the table is entirely covered with delicious food?)
In retrospect, I would have skipped centerpieces at our wedding, because you couldn't see them with the food.
I tend to think of holiday centerpieces as for the times your table isn't having a meal on it. Like, if you're having a party and it has a bunch of cookies on it. MMMM cookies.
Agreed. Or on a sideboard. Bring back the sideboard, I say! So damn useful.
SIDEBOARDS. My parents have a built in one, in their 100 year old house. I try to actually clean it off for Christmas dinner (oh, sideboards) and fancy it up a little. Feels festive.
I love sideboards. I have one (only it sits in my hallway now because apartment) but it was SO convenient for party hosting/becoming a bar/buffet/whatever it needed to be. Go antiquing?
I counted the minute I purchased my sideboard from ebay as the minute I was officially a grownup. and I am totes ok with that
I was so desperate for a sideboard when I realized I had zero storage in my kitchen... looked everywhere and ended up with a bookcase with doors on the bottom half. Bring back to sideboard!
A standing cookie party (or similar) and centerpieces would make sense (as would buffet-style; but we've never had a large enough kitchen or enough space somewhere else to do a buffet). But, due to a history of smallish apartments and largeish groups of friends and way-over-estimates on how much people can possibly eat (cooking party food is really fun!), I've just... never had an actual party in my home where I have not basically entirely covered all available horizontal surfaces with either people or food/beverages, I think.
So that means that at this point in my life, I know how to make cream puffs by the hundred from scratch and how to make roses out of chocolate, but not how to arrange a centerpiece (except for cheaty \"it's actually an appetizer\" centerpieces, which I have totally done to keep people occupied for the interval between when people arrive and when we're ready to serve the main meal. And our wedding had really nice potted plants as \"centerpieces\", which were supposed to go home with the people who helped set up/clean up, but I have no idea whether they actually did, as I don't think I told enough people that that was the \"plan\".). So, yeah, never done a Proper Non-edible Centerpiece, I think. Hm. Maybe when the \"more space available\" and \"having a party\" venn diagram circles next overlap, I'll hunt the sequins out of the craft supplies... :-)
Sounds like you have awesome parties. Also, we're most likely to have a centerpiece (a) on the dining room table so I'm not tempted to pile junk on it (though it has to come off as soon as there are , and (b) on our mantle, because nothing has to \"live\" on a mantle.
Your parties sound awesome.
Really, you're not missing much.
Oddly, this makes me feel better and less like I'm flunking at adulthood and/or have been Depriving My Guests All These Years. :-) I may just file \"non-edible centerpieces\" under \"things to do if-and-only-if I ever end up really wanting to do one\"... and, if that occasion arises, hunt through the APW archives for ideas of things to apply gold leaf and spraypaint to.
I'm a firm believer that food is the centerpiece of a dinner party. Maybe some candles also. But my theory on party decor is \"I will feed you delicious food.\" Yes. That's my decor theory.
That's my idea of a themed party, too, right there. ;-)
(technically, I think Proper Themed parties are also fun. But I do not feel the need for all parties to have any sort of theme/reason other than \"people enjoying food and each other, yay!\")
We didn't do center pieces at our wedding for this very reason! We had old wine bottles cleaned and labels removed for water (provided by the venue), with little chalkboard tags with the table number, then the big platters of food came out. It was perfect, and the chef and servers were so happy they didn't have to navigate around centerpieces.
Us, either. I figured that the only time I had ever noticed the flowers at a wedding was when I couldn't see past them to talk to people. Plus we had an afternoon tea, so the 3-tiered trays with the sandwiches & scones etc., plus pretty table numbers were all the decor we needed.
genius wedding reception!!
Um afternoon tea reception? This sounds so delightful and lovely! Pic?
Swooning over your reception...
This is just another one of so many reasons I insist that we do bar tables. No seating chart, mini simple centerpieces, I put the lazy in lazy bride.
It's funny because I would go all out if anyone wanted help jazzing up their wedding, but for my own I know there is going to be enough emotional stress without adding logistic and DIY stress.
I am, however, a HUGE fan of the seating chart. With bar tables it does make it skip-able, but I think it's usually pretty key usually to making people feel taken care of, and like they're not alone in a middle school lunchroom.
There are few wedding things that I'm unabashedly PRO on, but seating charts for most weddings is one of them.
I LOVE seating charts. I have been a guest at a few weddings where I just wasn't sure where I fit in (as in, I knew the couple super well, but not many people in their community) and it is a load off to have an assigned table.
(And even when I do know lots of people, I LOVE seeing who I've been sat with.)
I am a little surprised that this doesn't fall under the \"your guests are adults\" rule, but then I have never been to a wedding, we don't have any lone soldier guests, and I hate that middle school feeling.
I've been to quite a few weddings, only one with open seating. The wedding was for a long-time family friend who is about my age (our mothers are bffs from college), so I was there with my mom and her college buddies. We had to split our group for dinner, which was fine, everyone is eating anyway, and once the meal was over, our group came back together, snagged the chairs we needed, and created our home base to watch the dances/sip water after booty-shaking. So it worked in the end, without too much lost feeling. I think if I were there alone, or even just with a date, when i only knew the bride or groom, I would feel more lost. My mom's college buddies were pretty much the close-family substitute for the mother of the bride, though, so we had an \"in\" to the inner circle, and weren't dependent on the newlyweds for our only socializing.
Yep, as a guest at any large event with a seated meal, I'm way more comfortable with assigned tables (even better if assigned seats but that's asking a crap-ton from the hosts), and as the bride it was non-negotiable to have a seating chart not only for my own piece of mind but to lessen the likelihood someone would get hurt feels from feeling neglected/ not liking where they ended up sitting etc.
I've read your thoughts and seating and totally agree! I've often been that person with the middle school lunchroom feeling at large events... then at my wedding I assigned tables and thanks to a few no shows and some people ignoring the seating chart it happened to a few of my guests anyways... I was sad...
Not gonna lie, I've felt like a middle schooler a lot at weddings. I've never had the seating issue, but as a single girl I pretty much had to put all my efforts into not crying during final slow songs, while I sat alone in the corner -- just like middle school. My wedding will not end with, \"At Last,\" I'll tell you that. Amazing song, but really depressing when the caterers are cleaning up around you while you watch your friends dance and wonder if you'll ever have anyone to dance with.
Oh, little past Amanda dear, you only have to wait a couple more months! (And he really likes dancing).
I, too, had some of that happen at my wedding. I put a lot of work into the seating chart, to accommodate our blended families of origin as well as put people with similar interests and political viewpoints together. Some months after the wedding, someone in my family was shocked to find out they had some unique things in common with someone from his family, and I internally grumbled, \"Well you WOULD have known if you sat where I intended you to.\"
Assigned tables really help me, especially when I know only a few people. And especially ESPECIALLY when I was at weddings sans date. It also helps me be able to connect to other people I might otherwise not meet.
Lunchroom feeling, seconded, after nearly 20 weddings - even ones where I knew most of the guests or was family.
Most people aren't going to neatly peel off into groups of 8 for a 60\" round, so you may get 3 tables of, say, 5-6 people who really could have fit at 2 tables, and then you have 8 people who would have made 1 lovely table together wandering around and filling in gaps. Or you get 10 people trying to sit at an 8 person table who start pulling chairs from other tables. I've seen this all happen.
No seating works better if your groups are all fairly close (most know each other and you don't have 5 couples that will feel stranded), or your tables are tiny (like 4 people per table in a restaurant), or when you have long rectangular tables where there's LOTS of spare seating, or maybe when you have a sum of 50 people at the wedding so there's less of a \"lost\" feeling anyway.
I'm really biased right now because the last wedding I went to had no assigned tables, and I did the videography for the ceremony. By the time we wrapped up and made it to the reception (only 10-15 mins after the other guests), most seats had been claimed in the mad rush. We wandered around until we got lucky with 2 spare seats at a table with some acquaintances. I felt like crap. (Also the fault of the friends who we DROVE to the wedding who KNEW we were video-ing....)
It all worked out and it's not a BIG deal, but I love when I can spend 90 minutes at my table rather than in a scramble to sit with people I know.
Just to toss in my experience, we got married a few weeks ago with a 125 guest list and no seating chart, and it TOTALLY worked. Here are the reasons I think it was successful:
1. Our venue was full of wooden picnic tables, both inside and covered outside, and there were way more tables than needed to seat our guests, probably like 2x as many. This meant people could easily find an empty table with a buddy and didn't need to cram into the one empty seat left at a table full of people they didn't know. I would totally recommend that if you go 'no seating chart' to make sure there are at least a few extra tables than would be needed if every seat was assigned and spoken for.
2. There were only a few people there that didn't know any other guest, and those people I made sure to let them know that they were highly encouraged to bring a guest, made sure I introduced them to a few people at the rehearsal dinner and/or bachelorette party, and gave them a heads up that the seating would be open.
3. We had events before and after the meal that brought everyone back to the same space. This worked great because while lunch was a bit spread out and unstructured, the speeches right after lunch really brought the \"wedding\" back into to our picnic wedding.
Yes. Surplus seating and \"community style\" seating makes it more doable.
But a table full of 60\" rounds where there are only 4 \"spare\" seats and where you have a set number of chairs per table? Not so much.
\"It's funny because I would go all out if anyone wanted help jazzing up their wedding, but for my own I know there is going to be enough emotional stress without adding logistic and DIY stress.\"
This is exactly the approach we took to our wedding. My husband and I have been in and helped with tons of weddings that were full-tilt, all-hands-on-deck, collaboration affairs and enjoyed it, but when it came time for ours, we were like \"yeah, how about we keep it super simple because emotionally it won't be.\" I think had we taken more than 2 months to plan we would have done a little more, but we put our emotional bandwidth above decor and it was the right decision.
I am a huge, huge fan of skipping centerpieces, which are a pain in the ass. It can be harder to do at big round tables (unless you take the IDGF approach), but it's perfect for long tables.
Also, family style. So tempting, but usually more expensive then a buffet. That was our initial plan for skipping centerpieces, but turns out we couldn't afford it! Who knew?
I was totally in your camp til like, 3 days before the wedding and then I realised that I *needed* 87 thousand candle holders and candles and you know what, it looked amazing!
Photo pls disqus...?
From an old book by Susan Coolidge, from a conversation about manners, explaining why, in the author's opinion, it's counterintuitively more economical to serve multi-course meals pre-plated rather than family-style:
---
In the old days, when the meat came
on in a big platter, and the vegetables each
in its large covered dish, people had to put more on table than was really wanted, for
the sake of not looking mean and giving
their neighbors occasion for talk. Now, when
everything is carved on a side-table and a
nice little portion carried to each person,
you are able to do with exactly what is
needed. There need not be a great piece
of everything left over for look's sake.
---
I think this carries over beyond plated food [where you have the exact portions settled, and if it turns out you're low on peas, you just plate up slightly fewer peas to each person] to buffets as well - you can hit closer to the actual amount of food needed by the entire group if you go by full-group average rather than table average, because the highest table need (that table you put all the athletic teenage cousins at, maybe?) is going to be greater than the full-group average, and all the table leftovers, pooled (especially when this table liked this food more than that food; this other table went the other way), would likely be greater than the buffet leftovers.
The other kind of random problem/cost of family style at weddings is the serving dishes for each table - buffets use fewer serving dishes in total once you top a certain number of tables.
But yes, it's counterintuitive that \"family-style\" is generally not the cheapest way to cater nicely to a large group of people!
Yep, the price breakdown of family style v. buffet of those little \"secrets\" of catering. We were married at the Boonville Hotel which has a fantastic restaurant onsite and only does family-style service for groups (and most nights they are open in general), so for us, we knew what we were getting into. We also had a small wedding (under 60 people) and allocated the very vast majority of our budget to food and booze.
ETA: I really love all the center-piece tutorials and porn on this site and on pinterest, and next summer when I throw a \"10 years since I moved to the Bay\" party for myself, there will be awesome centerpieces.
We do buffet style dinners for most holidays... So the counters get covered in food and we have a centerpiece on the table. But they are probably overrated unless you're into them!
Agreed! Usually there is only room left for candles. The centerpiece gets moved aside when the table is set....assuming it's a nice dinner and everyone isn't exhausted, if that's the case the centerpiece gets left on the dining table in the dark lol.
I want to marry that CAKE, omg.
These are all so pretty! I'm a big fan of winter neutrals, along with winter pastels, like mint green and dove gray. So chic! I usually end up leaving some winter decor (like gold branches and mercury-glass candle holders) out after Christmas too...because who doesn't need a little sparkle in Jan/Feb?
I totally agree. January and February are so dark and cold around here, those twinkle lights need to stay up after Christmas to cheer me up!
I would love to know if they did the cable-knitting in piping or in teeny-tiny fondant strands, but I can't find the info anywhere. Le sigh.
As soon as I saw that cake I thought of you, Rachel. :D
Since we are getting married in a ski lodge/inn in Vermont in January, the winter theme is sort of implied. I love twinkle lights. The proprietors of the lodge let us in their attic over the summer and showed us literally 10 large tubs of twinkle lights from other weddings. Our reception is going to look like the inside of a disco ball. I mean that in the classiest way possible.
I think an inside-a-disco-ball reception with millions of twinkle lights (especially in a ski lodge in Vermont in January!) sounds incredible!
As a photographer, twinkle lights are like magic. They make all your pictures look like you spent FOREVER decorating. It's amazing.
This is also awesome because there is so much winter left after Christmas. Especially in New England. So much winter.
We had a Jewish wedding in December (to accommodate a sister in medical school) but my extended family and most of our friends have Christian backgrounds. Luckily we got married in Southern California with 70 degree temps and could avoid the December decor debate, because for our guests from the East Coast and Midwest it was VACATION, not winter wonderland. However, I did want some version of winter/December so we opted for no flowers and went with succulent centerpieces and all succulent bouquets because succulents are native to SoCal and at their peak coloring in the winter, AND are reusable--I still have them growing almost a year later in planters around the house. They make a great alternative \"winter\" decor scheme as shades of green, blue, gray and purple against white and silver.
Right now, I'm totally in love with all things glitter. And every DIY project I take on should have at least SOME glittery element. But I'm so scared I'll be sick of it by the end of January when we'll get married... So thanks for these ideas. I guess I have to move on to a little more style and a little less christmas...
Both David’s and my parents got married in December, which has got to be super unusual. When we got engaged, David was in law school, which meant that if we wanted to take a post-wedding honeymoon (we sure as hell did), we needed to plan the wedding for a law school break—December or summer. December had an immediate lure. First, it wasn’t eighteen months away (we didn’t rightly figure we could pull off the wedding we wanted in six months, leaving us with an eighteen month lead time on summer). Second, it was family tradition. For both of us.
For as long as I could remember, my mom had told me to get married in December, when the church was already decorated, at no cost to you. The only trouble was, we weren’t getting married in a church. Our little interfaith family was having a Jewish wedding. When you have Christian and Jewish backgrounds, December is a minefield. So as much as I would have enjoyed a nine-month engagement and a December wedding, we nixed it almost straight away. The biggest reason? Decorations.
Having, at that point, weathered several Decembers in our relationship, I could see how a winter wedding was going to play out. There would be fights over evergreens. Is it, “simply a seasonal plant,” or “a really Christmas-y plant”? I’m smart enough to avoid Poinsettias, but it’s hard to totally avoid red. And green and red would have been out, but would blue and white be just erring in the other direction? And has Christmas taken over the twinkly white lights game, or can anyone use them? Continue fights ad nauseam.
While we skipped those particular wedding-related fights, we re-visit this decor debate every single holiday season, while the Pinterest onslaught makes me feel like the most left out person in the world. Typically, by this point in November, I’ve started to feel like an (very sad) outcast from the Internet. Because while I love Christmas, David hates it with equal fervor (something about a lifetime of feeling left out). Plus, we have a Jewish household… that celebrates Christmas… and what do you even do with that? While I’m gearing up to decorate for the holidays, green and red and gold and everything Santa is not helping me out. And after years of trees and garlands decorated with blue and white ornaments (our ongoing compromise), I’d really like something a little more… creative?
With that in mind, the APW staff decided to round up the best not-red-and-green-all-over holiday decorations. Here are our picks for seasonal decor that doesn’t scream, “SANTA CAME OVER AND I HUGGED THE REINDEER WHILE HE ATE COOKIES, AND THEN WE TALKED ABOUT BABY JESUS AND DRANK SOME MULLED WINE.” Except for the mulled wine. We’re all obviously very into that. So let’s bring on the subtle, and the sparkles. I hope these tutorials help you decorate your house (if your reason for the season doesn’t happen to be Jesus, or if you’re just tired of red and green), or plan the hell out of your winter wedding. Hot buttered bourbon cheers!
Autumnal & Rustic
Perfect for your friendsgiving feast. Bonus: leaves are basically free!
Dried flower bouquets have really beautiful texture and depth. And, you can buy them farther in advance of your wedding and quit worrying about how you’re going to keep them alive long enough in the winter.
Metallic spray paint + fruit = instant fabulous party centerpiece.
We are all about any DIY project that you can do while watching Parenthood.
You could also match your garland to your place card holders by painting them neon.
Pumpkins don’t have to disappear after Halloween, y’all! They’re still perfect for November (particularly when spray painted).
Bird’s Nest Ring Holder, via Francis and Joan’s Snowy Canadian Wedding on APW, photo by Photobox Photography
One of my favorite ideas for an unconventional ring “pillow.” Bird’s nests are home, and you’re making a home together. Awwww….
Glitter & Lights
This has got to be one of my favorite wedding decor pictures of the year. By which I mean obviously you should steal i.
Branches spray painted gold is one of my favorite winter decor statements. Plus, it will add some height and glam to your centerpieces on the cheap.
It’s called the season of light for a reason. The reason is it’s real pretty.
It’s like glitter exploded and made glitter babies. Is that so wrong? Bonus: it’s fake! Make it ahead, stash it somewhere, and bring it out whenever you want to look extra fancy.
You can’t go wrong with sparkly stars. And for those of us negotiating the Jewish/ Christmas divide this time of year, you can make six pointed stars, and stop the argument before it starts.
Sparkle that won’t leave with your guests at the end of the night.
If you invite me to a party and give me a fancy drink stirrer, I’ll be so impressed with you I won’t even notice the unfolded laundry in the corner.
Not technically decor, but who cares, they’re glitter donuts.
Winter White
DIY your own mercury glass, or thrift it, but either way you’ll end up with instantly pretty centerpieces. Adding sequins on the table is optional, but recommended.
Did we mention this is fake. IT’S FAKE. Also, the candles and holders are from Ikea. Tie things up with some hot pink ribbon, and you’ve got festive without the Santa.
Simple, cute, and definitely the right skill level for a lazy DIY session.
Probably my favorite backdrop of our series. Possibly add a little sparkle to the clouds to winterize them. Mmmm… sparkles.
A classy centerpiece idea for non-crafters. Switch up the paper to match any winter decor scheme you’ve got going on.
It’s a cake, but it looks like a sweater! Let’s make December all about decor that looks like sweaters, and let peace reign
Original article and pictures take http://apracticalwedding.com/2014/11/21-winter-decor-ideas/ site
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