This will be
a series of three blogs about planning and executing a wedding and the
ancillary activities that go along with it.
For those of you who have not done this, it is a marathon. Many people begin their planning more than a
year in advance. We had decided to do
this about 5 months ahead of time.
Devin and
Shane were married by a judge in Appleton, WI in March 2013. Shane and her parents were planning a big
wedding in Nanjing, China in Sept 2013.
Since most of our family and friends would not be able to travel to
China to celebrate with us, we decided to host a wedding reception in December
2013 for Devin and Shane in New Orleans where most of our relatives live. This would be the THIRD celebration of their
wedding!!
Below is the photo from the Appleton wedding ceremony:
So here is a
breakdown of everything that goes into the making of a wedding.
VENUE
In the
summer, my sister, Anna, suggested a venue.
Her best friend, Nancy, had connections with a venue on a canal just off
Lake Pontchartrain. Caitlin, Devin and I
went to see it and liked the versatility of it.
It would work well for a small wedding.
It had several rooms, a bar, and a deck that surrounded it which was on
the canal leading to the lake. There was
also a fountain, twinkling lights on the trees and there were several seating
areas outside. It turned out that Nancy
got us a great discount! The wedding
guest list went from around 70, easily handled in the venue to around 130,
where we would also need a tent. New
Orleans is rarely cold for Christmas, so I thought chances are it would be warm
this Christmas for the wedding and everyone could enjoy the view outside of the
sailing marina, the yacht owned by the owner of the Saints, the yacht club, the
lake, etc. Well, as the day of the
wedding came near, first it got very cold, and then it began raining the day
before! So, we ordered a tent with clear
sides so that you could see the twinkling lights on the deck and heaters to
keep it warm. That was just the
beginning of all the planning for the wedding.
The venue
had an incredible wedding coordinator.
She said that she could do as much or as little as I wanted. While I was still in KSA, we coordinated by
email what the flowers should look like, the color of the tablecloths and table
toppers, the table arrangements, candles, limos, tent, etc, etc. She not only got things done, she had
wonderful suggestions and was such a fun and easy person with whom to work.
WELCOME BASKETS
The picture below shows some of the baskets and paraphernalia to make them.
I needed to make 14 welcome baskets for those
family and friends who were coming from out of town and staying in the Hotel
Provincial with us or a recommended Marriott in Metairie. It turned out that many more people came in
from out of town but I didn’t know where they were staying. In
each basket, I put mostly Louisiana products:
2 bottles of
Abita Springs water
1 mini
bottle of red wine (not from Louisiana, unless I wanted to do a strawberry
wine)
1 mini
bottle of white wine (same as above)
2 plastic
wine glasses
2 New
Orleans pralines
Amaretto and
sesame seed cookies from an old New Orleans Italian bakery, Angelo Brocato’s
2 bags of
Zapp’s Voodoo potato chips (spicy)
I picked up
the pralines at a little shop in Metairie with an adorable older lady running
the shop and her granddaughter helping her.
When I kept finding out that more people were coming from out of town, I
needed more baskets, and had to go back several times for more pralines. When I would walk into the shop, the older
lady would say, “You need more baskets?” with a smile. The last time that I went was a few days
before Christmas and they were making party baskets which also had
pralines. I wanted 4 more pralines, but
they didn’t have any more made. So they
robbed some of their baskets that they were making for parties for the
pralines, then the older lady grabbed a huge pot and said that she guessed she
had better get busy and make more pralines!
My niece and goddaughter, Kristina, and her boyfriend sweetly offered to
deliver them for me on the days that the guests arrived.
WEDDING FAVORS
The next
project, which was bigger, was to make favors for the wedding. I had sent Shane 3 ideas for wedding favors
and she picked one that had small bottles filled with a flavored sugar with a
tag on it that said “Sweet of you to come”.
I looked up recipes for flavored sugar and found vanilla sugar, cinnamon
sugar, peppermint sugar and a few others that I was not interested in at
all. I decided on vanilla sugar. I thought it would be easy to use in coffee,
tea, making cookies, etc. You basically
split a vanilla bean lengthwise, scrape out the paste inside the bean and mix
it with the sugar and let the mixture sit for 2 weeks to enhance the flavor. I thought that it sounded easy and would
taste good.
The number
of people coming to the wedding was between 95-130 people. It seemed to be a constantly shifting
number. I ordered 128 mini clip top
jars. I measured the dimensions of the
bottles and calculated the volume in cubic inches. I then went online to determine how many
ounces/pounds were required to fill 128 bottles of that volume. I was shocked when it calculated 50 lbs! I thought that it must be a mistake. I went back online to one of those converter
websites and again came out with 50 lbs.
I thought “Oh no! This is going
to be expensive.” The sugar would be one
thing, but vanilla beans for 50 lbs of sugar would be very expensive. The recipe called for a few vanilla beans per
2 lbs of sugar. Luckily, my sister, Anna
had a contact in restaurant supply. I
was so relieved to go there. We found a
50 lb bag of sugar for $17. Anna and I
each had to take an end of the bag to pick it up and put it on the pallet. I wish
that I had asked Ms Antha (Anna’s mother in law), who was with us, to take a
picture of us getting it onto the pallet.
J
We could not find vanilla beans, just vanilla extract. My sister asked and they said it was UNDER
their counter. She brought them out and
the price was so much more reasonable than what you get in a grocery
store. They sold a cylindrical container
with vacuum packed bags of about forty 12” long vanilla beans for
$20!! I bought two containers. In a regular grocery store, it is two small
6” vanilla beans for over $10.
For the next
few days, I made the vanilla sugar. Of
course, the tedious part was slitting each vanilla bean lengthwise and scraping
the paste into the sugar. I think that I
filled five 2 gallon zip loc bags. I
left the scraped pods in the sugar to impart more flavor for the two weeks that
it “marinated”. In the meantime, Shane
and I washed and dried the 128 bottles.
I wanted to put a tag on each bottle saying something like “Sweet of you
to come” as I had seen online, but more personal. Ken is my “go to guy” for
poems/rhymes/toasts, etc. I asked him to
come up with a 4 line rhyme having to do with vanilla sugar to put on the favor
tags. He came through with:
Your coming was so
sweet
To celebrate our fete
So here’s a bit of
sugar
Mixed with some vanilla.
Just a farewell simple
farewell treat.
Shane and
Devin had decided that the theme of the wedding would be Sunset at the roof of
the World. To go along with that theme,
the colors of the wedding would be a particular blue and a particular orange of
a sunset that they had seen on their honeymoon in Tibet after the wedding in
China. They gave me a picture that they
had taken of it, so that I would know the colors. I decided to use that picture on the other
side of tag. One side of the tag would
have the poem and the other side would have the picture from the Tibet. I got the Avery tags at Office Depot and
created the 128 favor tags.
Next step
was to get the right colored small blue flowers to tie around the neck of the
bottles with the tag. I found the
flowers at Michael’s but they need a little pizzazz, so I glued very small
white flowers into the centers of the blue flowers. Two weeks later, my niece and godchild,
Kristina, and her boyfriend, David helped me fill the bottles. Then, I tied the flowers and tags on the
bottles with a thin blue ribbon. I found
a cute wooden chest at Garden Ridge Pottery and put some shredded orange paper
in the bottom for cushioning and an ethnic looking scarf, which I borrowed from
my sister Anna, across the bottom and over the sides of the box. Then all the bottles were placed on top of
that to make a pretty display. The
favors were done!! Quick side note: I did
not need 50 lbs of sugar. I only
needed about 25 lbs, so there was lots of bagged vanilla sugar to give away. I think that when I measured the volume, I
should not have measured to the top of the bottle, only to the neck. L
I bought a
small matching chest to contain notecards where guests could write down best
wishes and advice to Devin and Shane.
Some of those pieces of advice were very interesting. I am going to scan the cards into files and
make a poster for them and frame it.
ALCOHOL & LIBATIONS
The venue
did not provide alcohol, which is good in that you can save money, but a pain
in the butt in physical labor and logistics.
DeeDee, the wedding coordinator, had suggested that I go online and find
tables to determine the amount of liquor and soft drinks needed for a
wedding. I printed out the tables from
two different sites and they were a little different in their amounts. Anna and my brother in law, Dieter, entertain
quite a lot. I showed the lists to him
and asked him what he thought. He looked
at the list and said, “This is a little light for a New Orleans wedding” and
increased everything. J
On the
Monday before the wedding, Devin, Shane and I went to Sam’s Club to get the
alcohol, tonic water and soft drinks.
That was crazy! We had two
pallets full of alcohol, with Shane and Devin maneuvering them around Sam’s
aisles. Well, it all would not fit in
the 7 passenger van that I had rented to transport our Chinese relatives around
town on our excursions. I had to call my
sister and ask her to bring her Cadillac Escalade for the overflow. At Anna’s house, we had 5 of us unloading it
into Anna’s game room and then 7 of us bringing it to the venue two days before
the wedding. Unfortunately, I was so
busy at the wedding making sure that I visited with everyone, I only had a ½ glass
of wine and a sip of champagne. L
FOOD
DeeDee had
recommended a caterer. By email, we had
hammered out a tentative menu for the buffet.
When I arrived in December, my daughter and I went to do a taste testing
and it was good. This was the menu:
Hors d’oeuvres
to pass:
Duck
empanadas
Stuffed
mushrooms with Italian sausage
Parmesan chevre
cups holding 3 chevre cheese balls rolled in mint, cranberry and candied
hazelnuts.
Buffet:
Fruit and
Cheese display
Couscous with tzatziki sauce on the side
Mixed
Grill: Beef filet, chicken breast,
grilled shrimp, blackened redfish and pork loin
Rolls,
butter and sauces for meat
Chicken
and Tasso Pasta
I had good
reviews from everyone about all the dishes except the grilled redfish. It was way too salty!
WEDDING
VIDEO
Shane
created an adorable video to show throughout the wedding with pictures of both
of them growing up, him mostly in the US and her in China, followed by pictures
of the wedding in China, then their adult life together.. It was accompanied by really sweet music. There were 3 TV’s at the venue, but they did
not communicate with each other. So
Dieter went a few days before to figure out the playing of the 3 copies of the
videos simultaneously. He also was in
charge of the video at the wedding. Thank
goodness, because I do not do electronics!
J
CUPCAKE
TOWER
Shane
decided that she did not want a wedding cake.
She wanted a cupcake tower. My
sister, Anna and I went to a bakery called Bittersweet Confections to try the
cupcakes. They had a wonderful selection
and the owner was so easy to work with.
We selected white chocolate cupcakes with salted caramel icing. We could have had them stuffed, but that was
way too sweet. I ordered royal blue
cupcake liners. The bakery owner said
that she “did not do cupcake towers”, that I would have to get one and have it
assembled. I ordered a 7 tier maypole
mirrored step cupcake tower that had the top layer set up for a small 8”
cake. In that way, they still could have
a cake cutting ceremony. It was pretty. The morning before the wedding, Caitlin and I
arrived at the bakery at 7:30 am and assembled the tower.
Here is the top of the cupcake tower:
DJ
The DJ
that normally would have performed at the venue was not available that
night. I was in KSA feeling frustrated
with trying to find one from across the world.
Ken suggested that we ask his brother’s best friend who is a DJ part
time. I thought that was a great idea
because we had been to parties when he DJ’d.
We contacted him and thankfully he said yes. Devin and Shane sent him all the songs that
they wanted and he was great. There was
one computer crash with the music, but it came back up!
PHOTOGRAPHER
For the
photographer, I remembered that Anna’s friend, Nancy (the one who got us the
venue for a very good price), had a nephew who is a photographer. He took family pictures of our entire family
under the oaks of City Park a few years ago and did a great job. He agreed to do it and did and awesome
job! He went above and beyond getting me
the pictures before I left for KSA. At
the end of the wedding, I asked when I could get the pictures. He said in a week or so. I told him that I would be leaving for KSA in
3 days, that he would have to deliver them to my sister. He said that he would try to get them
earlier, but could not promise anything.
The wedding was on Saturday night, and on Monday night we were at Ruth’s
Chris Steak house entertaining our Chinese relatives on our last night
together, when he shows up is Tommy, the photographer!! He not only got the photos done and on CD’s,
he hand delivered me 5 sets at the restaurant!!
He is absolutely awesome!
NEXT
BLOG: PICTURES OF THE ACTUAL WEDDING!
No comments:
Post a Comment