Latest Articles by cbailey

The Yuletide 'Tis the season for a Christmas Wedding

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Christmas time, the season of excitement, family get-togethers, sharing and communion. It's a time when friends and family come together not only to deck the halls with boughs of holly, but to gather together in joyous reminiscing of a year gone by and to share hopeful expectations for the coming year.

Why not add to the yule tide cheer this Christmas by tying the knot with a Christmas Wedding?

Having a Christmas theme wedding this winter is a great way to celebrate the peace and joy of the winter holidays and is a sure way to make your wedding a memorable one for years to come. Sure, there are some who cringe at the thought of exchanging vows at a time of sub-zero temperatures, but winter weddings, especially during the Christmas season has become increasingly acceptable and is quite popular.

In fact, from a logistical stand point, a Christmas wedding may make more sense as family and friends are already on holidays which will make it easier to attend your wedding. But you will want to make sure that you send out your invitations at least 3-4 months in advance to give your guests ample notice of your upcoming Christmas wedding. We all know how busy it can get as the Christmas season approaches so you'll want to make sure your wedding party and guests don't overbook themselves and end up missing your special day.

Are you determined to have a Christmas wedding but not too sure how to make it all happen? Then consider the Traditional and Elegant Christmas wedding themes, they're really quite popular;

The Elegant Christmas Wedding Theme

A beautiful option for a Christmas wedding is to make everything very formal and elegant. Think black tie and evening dress and all the elegance of a grand ball. You could decorate the church or wedding hall with white lights and satin and trim the pews with gold ribbons. Dress your attendants in elegant evening wear and wear a glamorous vintage style gown. Whether indoors or out, make sure to include an elegant white Pashmina wool wrap, for you and your attendants to make sure you not too cold during the ceremony.

At the reception, have a large natural Christmas tree in the corner of the room decorated with ropes of white lights and golden bows. Decorate the tables with large bowls containing gold or white floating candles and white rose petals. As a wedding favor, give guests a small gold Christmas ornament inscribed with the date of the wedding and your names. Guests will have a memorable keepsake reminder of your wedding. Wrap all the ornaments, in a white box with a gold ribbon, and pile them under the Christmas tree. At the end of the reception invite each guest to pick their own “present” from under the tree. An elegant Christmas wedding with simple, tasteful decorations in white and gold doesn’t have to be expensive. If you are creative you can have a gorgeous and elegant Christmas wedding even if you’re on a tight budget.

The Traditional Christmas Wedding Theme

Perhaps a traditional Christmas wedding would be your style. If so, use all the traditional Christmas elements to create a romantic, warm, joyous event that will combine the good will of the Christmas season with the happiness of your wedding. Decorate the church or wedding hall with multi colored Christmas lights. Use green and red poinsettias for decorations, and carry red roses bundled together with lots of greenery tied with a gold ribbon for your bouquet. Dress your attendants in simple holiday dresses in red and green, with gold jewelry. Use Christmas present bows to decorate each pew in the church and fill the church with gold candles.

At the reception, focus on making the room romantic and cozy. What you want to do is recreate the warmth and feeling of your living room on Christmas morning. Have a large natural Christmas tree in a corner decorated with strings of colored lights, strings of tinsel, candy canes, icicles, ropes of popcorn and cranberries, bows, ornaments, and candles. Choose lots of different styles of ornaments, but make sure that each one is marked with the date and your names, even if it’s just marked with a pretty printed sticker on the bottom. Make sure there are more ornaments on the tree than there are guests at the reception and invite each guest to select an ornament off the tree as a party favor.

Make a nice selection of coffees, teas, eggnog, and hot chocolate. Have platers of Christmas cookies, candy canes, white and green mints, fudge, and other Christmas treats set out on tables for your guests to snack on. You could also serve a traditional Christmas dinner of ham or turkey with all the fixings. If you are going to allow children at the reception, consider setting up a children’s area with plenty of seating, a DVD player and holiday favorites such as The Christmas Story, Frosty the Snowman, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and other holiday movies favorites to make the evening an enjoyable one for them as well.

Having a Christmas wedding can be a lovely way for everyone to celebrate your marriage and the holidays at the same time. Use the excitement, joy, love and happiness of the Christmas season to make your wedding a memorable one. The Yuletide 'tis the season to have a Christmas wedding.

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Calvin and Maria Bailey are authors of the book The Bride’s Guide to Planning a Winter Wedding as well as The Winter Bride Newsletter. They've been happily married for 21 years and have 5 children.
***This article may be freely copied and distributed provided that this resource box remains unedited and is not removed***

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Your Winter Wedding Invitation Inspiration

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

You've decided to have your fairytale winter wedding. Congratulations!

Now comes the one step that will create an ever increasing anticipation in the hearts and minds of the guests you invite. The step of creating, then delivering your invitations asking family and friends to share your joy and to celebrate with you on your winter wedding day.

Knowing your family and friends are excited and anticipate taking part in your winter wedding will build your own excitement, confidence and make your joy even greater as you move closer to your wedding day. To ensure that the excitement and anticipation of everyone involved carries right through to your wedding day, the invitations your guests receive will have to stand out and be extra ordinary. They will need more intensity, convey more passion, and be able to create a greater romantic atmosphere for your wedding than the average summer-type invitations.

Since it's a winter wedding, you want your invitations to arouse and inspire romantic feelings and thoughts of freshly falling snow, wintery landscapes, Jack Frost, icicles and sleigh bells. Yes, you want your invitations to produce in your guests the type of thoughts and feelings that caused famous painters like Picasso, Van Gough and da Vinci to create their masterpieces and works of art.

This is the type of effect you want your invitations to have on your guests. Yes, your invitations should leave them enthusiastically counting down the days....

Sounds good, but where do you begin?

Well, first it's important to determine how much time you have. If you need your invitations completed and sent out by a certain date, then keep this date in mind as you move forward. If you're making the invitations yourself, you can be a little more flexible with your schedule. However, should you decide to have your invitations custom made by professional printers, you will need to give them enough time to get them produced, packaged and sent back to you so that you can deliver them.

But why leave such an important task of conveying your heart, mind and soul in the hands of the printers?

This is YOUR dream winter wedding! After the wedding is over and all the guests have gone home, what better reminder and testament of the love you two share than knowing that it was YOUR heart, YOUR mind, YOUR creativity and YOUR invitation inspiration that went into creating your winter wedding invitations, and not some impersonal cookie cutter poetry found on many pre-made invitations. Yes, after it's all said and done, you'll realize that a little piece of who you are has gone into creating your own masterpiece of love!

Now, the idea of making your own winter wedding invitations may sound very appealing to you, but when it comes down to it, at this moment, do you have the invitation inspiration to create your own winter wedding masterpiece? I believe everyone, especially those who go against the norm and have a winter wedding must have at least one masterpiece within them. All you need is a little invitation inspiration!

But where do you find such inspiration?

Well, grab your surf board, put on your sunglasses and jump the next wave out onto world wide web! Get online, open up your favorite web browser and do a search specifically on "winter wedding invitations." For those new to the Internet, do the following...

1) Open up your browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer etc...)

2)) In the search box at the top of the page, type the following..."winter wedding invitations" (remember to include the quotation marks)

3)) Click "Search"

As you can see, by conducting as search on the phrase "winter wedding invitations," there are literally thousands of pages available to view. So as you view these samples, begin to brainstorm and let your creativity take over as you ponder the exact style of invitation you want to create.

If you don't find anything you like or you're still struggling for inspiration, then your next option could be to spend a day going down to all your local bridal shops, stationary supplies stores, newspaper stands, book stores, printers, libraries etc... and browsing through all the bridal magazines and journals. Take notice of the various examples of winter wedding invitations. Notice the cool colors, the wintery patterns, the seasonal imagery and the poetic styles. You may see some styles that may not be suited specifically for a winter wedding, but that's ok, what you're trying to do at this point is get the creativity and inspiration juices flowing.

Another way to prime the pump of invitation inspiration is to consider the wedding ceremony venue. If you're having an indoor wedding, take a pen and notepad and go down and have a look at the shape and color of the building. Is it painted with cool, wintery colors? What feelings do you have as you stand inside? The shape of many cathedral style churches have been known to conjure up different types of mental winter imagery.

Or perhaps you're having an outdoor winter wedding? Can you envision the wintery landscape, the gently falling snow or snow flowers? Any of these would look great on your invitations. Do you live in an area where there will be a lot of snow or do you normally have a green christmas? Being in the open air and listening to the birds sing may also be enough to spur your moment of creative genius.

These are but a few ideas to help stir up your creativity and inspiration. When it's all said and done, the invitations you produce will send chills down the back of your invited guests. Chills not from cold, but from the fact that you we able to capture the heart of the season and they now hold a piece of it in their hands. So as you come upon your moment of invitation inspiration, go with your gut instinct. Let it flow in the joy of the season and let it create a masterpiece of love that reaches out and grips the heart of friends and family alike.

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Calvin Bailey is an author and the chief editor of "The Winter Bride," a free weekly newsletter providing relevant winter wedding ideas, tips, money-saving ideas and wedding merchant reviews. Visit his website at www.winterweddingbells.com to receive your free subscription.

Calvin resides in Ontario Canada with his wife and his 5 children.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Amazing Benefits Of A Winter Wedding

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

A romantic winter wedding can be one of the most exciting, beautiful and memorable events in the life of a bride and groom. The romantic nature of winter weddings makes the winter season a favorite time of year the world over, to exchange wedding vows and say "I do".

The picturesque winter landscapes, the freshly falling snow, the romantic sleigh rides, its the stuff dreams are made of! But what's will the cost of those dreams be? Well, not as much as you might think!

One of the primary benefits of having a winter wedding is that it’ll be the off season for most merchants you'll do business with. You'll have stronger negotiating power when it comes to purchasing wedding products and services items like the invitations, wedding dress, tuxedos, decorations, DJ's, catering or honeymoon vacation. Even renting a location for the ceremony and reception can be negotiable. With such negotiating power, it can be easier for the bride and groom to keep their wedding budget without turning their dream of a romantic fairytale winter wedding into a nightmare.

The benefits of planning a winter wedding are numerous. Below are three examples of how brides and grooms can save money on the products and services they will require for their winter wedding.

1) Due to the nature of supply and demand during the spring, summer and fall wedding season, the rental of a wedding hall and reception room will be at a premium and can be quite expensive. Many venues will charge based on the size of room you will require. Obviously, if you have many quests attending, you will require a larger venue. Now, you could choose to cut back on the number of guests you invite to share your special day, but why do that? By choosing to have a winter wedding, you could invite all your guests and negotiate the price of the venue down to suit your budget.

2) With the high peak wedding season in full swing during the months of March - November, purchasing or renting a wedding dress and tuxedo can prove to be rather pricey endeavor. However, there is more economical option for the budget conscious bride and groom. Have a romantic winter wedding! During the winter months of December to February, wedding merchants such as bridal and beauty shops, jewelers, wedding consultants, decorations and rental shops, and some florists will be experiencing a decrease in demand for their product and services and as a result, are more willing to negotiate prices . Couples who plan a winter wedding can use this to their advantage and put the power to negotiate these prices back in their own hand, where it belongs!

Doing so may result in getting the deal of a lifetime!

3) Invitations, flowers, and favors are small, but important parts of every wedding and although costly, must have a place within every winter wedding budget. Flower arrangements, corsages and centerpieces can be made at home rather than purchased pre-made. During the winter months, you’ll find great deals on high quality craft material such as ribbons, bows and silk flowers. This will enable the bride and groom (with the help of friends and family of course!) to put together beautiful decorative flower arrangements for their winter wedding at a fraction of the cost of purchasing such items during the high peak wedding seasons.

There’s a lot of work that goes into planning a wedding at any time of year. Planning a winter wedding is no exception. Every bride and groom wants to make sure they are receiving the best value for every wedding dollar they spend. For the budget conscious bride and groom who have decided on a winter wedding, there will be plenty of opportunities to save their money and at the same time make their winter wedding a romantic, beautiful, memorable experience for family, friends and each other.

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Calvin and Maria Bailey are authors of the book The Bride’s Guide to Planning a Winter Wedding as well as several wedding related articles. They have been happily married for 21 years and are currently raising 5 children at home.

Receive more winter wedding ideas, tips, money saving ideas and gift reviews by visiting their website at http://www.winterweddingbells.com and signing for their free weekly newsletter entitled The Winter-Bride.

***Please note: this article may be freely copied and distributed provided that this resource box remains

unaltered, unedited and is not removed***

Source: http://www.articletrader.com