Components of a Community Based Wedding

In no way am I saying that our wedding will work for everyone. But it was perfect for us. We want to share what we hope becomes a new tradition in weddings.

We live in an expensive city (San Francisco), and a lot of what made this wedding possible, was traveling three hours outside the city. Prices immediately dropped (for everything but rentals) when we got outside the traditional wedding areas.

I'll list our components here and go into more details in a future post.

Community

· Our entire guest list (except one pregnant couple) stayed with us on the site.

· While not everyone can do this, we wanted to find a place where we could host our family's accommodations. The economy has hit our family hard and wanted everyone to come celebrate for all three days. It was completely worth it, and everyone appreciated it.

· We grouped people together and asked them to plan their meals before the wedding which spurred amazing groupings, beautiful moments, and great food!

· Despite our huge families and many friends, because of space, we could only invite 80 people to our wedding. We narrowed down the guest list to people we hope will be active participants in our lives. We wanted them all to know each other, to break bread together, and to have a memorable experience in a beautiful place. According to the guests we've spoken with, it worked.

Sustainability

· We did everything we could to purchase elements of our wedding locally. Bubbs and I usually try to support local business in our daily lives, but this was another element that became easier as we looked outside the traditional "wedding" vendors.

· We purchased all of our wine & beer from local organic makers

· Our caterer used local organic ingredients to make our delicious BBQ feast

· We purchased a lot of the vases and décor from local thrift shops (even though we live three hours away)

· Our table runners were made from recycled burlap coffee sacks

· The candles were either made from soy (burns clean) flakes or were purchased second hand from craigslist.

· Just by alerting our guests on our blog that we were trying to have a "clean/green" wedding, we ended up really engaging them in the process (recycled gift wrap, reused gifts, carpooling, etc.)

Style

· We went with a simple and difficult to mess up style.

· Focused on nature, sustainability, and things that were recyclable

· Used burlap for décor (it was reused from a coffee roaster and compostable when we were done)

· Chose a location that was beautiful without a lot of distraction

· I followed blogs, looked at expensive shops to get inspiration, but ended up making a lot of the décor myself, for a teensy fraction of the retail price.

Love

· Our amazing cousin marrying us

· We wrote our vows together over many months. Not only did we spend time looking at relationships that worked, but also those that didn't. We wanted to make sure we were promising the same things to each other (no surprise vows here).

· Creating our ceremony from scratch. Looking at a lot of different vows on many different wedding websites, we took pieces of each, but our ceremony was all about letting our community understand our love and our commitment very simply and very clearly.

· Bubbs and I had mini vacations to plan our wedding - we went wine tasting in mendocino county and ate at different restaurants, so every element had a bit of our love and our experience in it.

· Having “wedding parties” to make music playlists, do crafts, and organize all the elements.

· Focusing on community building and having our community surround us for three days.