The Program For Today Is...

Since I have been on my creative roll towards the end of the planning, one of the other projects I decided should be snazzed up was the program. I figured that if the wedding invitation was like a theatre production flyer and our reception invite was a backstage pass to the main party then the event program as it were, being part of the paraphernalia of the day, should also fit in with the whole production theme. It therefore needed to contain bios of the cast and other interesting facts or assorted titbits to keep people entertained. Because after all, another reason to actually get a program is to keep yourself amused while you’re waiting for the show to kick off.

So our program looked a little different than others that I have seen. It had a lot of the more traditional stuff such as the order of service and the readings and such but it also had cartoons, Sudoku, a word search, humorous quotations, the Good Wife’s Guide from 1955 (because we thought it was really amusing) and an editorial on wedding superstitions and the traditions that we were upholding. We decided to make it like a book and have it ring bound rather than folded and it had turned into one big formatting headache by the end of the process but we were happy with it so that’s what counts yeah?

In a way it was somewhat plain as the whole thing was in black and white. Our program wasn’t elaborately printed on the back of a fan (because a fan in winter would have seemed a bit ridiculous quite frankly and you wouldn’t have had enough fingers to hold all the fans required to get the amount of stuff we actually wrote for the program printed anyway). We also didn’t create the program as a CD or a scroll or any of the other weird and unusual creations that some people with an awful lot of time and or money seem to produce.

I found it quite amazing what options are out there for personalising your wedding. These last months leading up to the wedding I have been looking for creative ideas and whilst most magazines seem to be pretty much a waste of space in this area, blog stalking has produced some interesting options. An alternative to place cards are using childhood or wedding pictures from your guests and a neat idea for a guestbook is to have your friends and family “leaf” their name and thumbprint on a poster of a bare tree trunk and its branches. Unfortunately we don’t have enough time at this point to go down the photo avenue and we already have another idea for our “guestbook” but I think that our alternative, our program and the other personal touches we have made to our day will make it a memorable one.