Wedding Weekend
October 13, 2008
Weekend weddings are becoming more popular, particularly as families are spread further apart. They usually begin on Friday night, continue with the wedding Saturday and conclude with a post-wedding breakfast on Sunday before everyone returns home.
Planning activities for these weekend-long celebrations doesn’t have to be difficult; in fact, it can be quite a bit of fun if you keep everyone’s needs in mind. First, consider the wedding. Will this be a formal wedding with a sit-down dinner at its center? If so, you might want to ban a formal rehearsal dinner and replace it instead with an informal barbecue dinner or picnic.
Will the wedding be near a lake? How about planning a day at the lake on Saturday, filled with pre-wedding activities like swimming races and beach volleyball.
One popular pre-wedding activity is a scavenger hunt. Prior to the wedding weekend, a list of meaningful items should be drawn up, and guests placed in two teams. The list should include things like “get a brochure from the jewelry store where (groom) bought (bride)’s ring” or “take a picture of the group at the location where the couple got engaged”.
You can even offer lavish prizes for the team that wins the scavenger hunt, such as gift certificates or gourmet food and wine baskets. You can create teams of friends versus family, or men versus women (always a popular choice).
Another activity that’s popular during wedding weekends is a competitive sport activity, such as baseball or flag football. Offer prizes for performance (first home run gets a kiss from the bride) or make silly rules, like members of the bridal party have to wear tiaras while running bases or members of the groom’s family should always have their shirts on backwards.
If the wedding weekend guests will mostly be family, you can schedule a home movie-viewing event, including home movies from both the bride and groom’s families. For even more fun, consider an activity where the movies are mixed up and the guests have to guess which family’s videos they are watching. This might sound easy, but depending on the contents, it could be hard, particularly if the bride and groom are babies in the photos.
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