CONNECT
From the Bride - How COVID changed our wedding plans:
- We ran a half marathon in February, about five weeks before our wedding, and we thought that would be the most dramatic thing to happen before the wedding…we had no idea what about to go down in the next month ahead.
- Our guest list was the most affected by COVID. It was crazy how much changed in so little time. After we had nearly everything finalized, the week before our wedding our guest list dropped to under 100 people (we had originally planned for around 140), and people were texting and calling us up until the day before the wedding. Of course, it was totally understandable to both me and Mike that some of our guests were no longer going to be able to make it, but it was still incredibly emotional and stressful because the days leading up to our wedding day looked nothing like what I had dreamed of for so long (we had been planning for over 2 years!), and we didn’t quite know how to deal with some of our close family and friends not being there and other changing plans on top of the normal wedding excitement and nerves. I threatened to cancel our wedding multiple times the week leading up to it because I really did not know what to do. (Thankfully no one let me!)
- Two days before the wedding, Mike and one of my bridesmaids asked me, in the most loving way, why those “extra” things mattered so much to me—we were still going to get married, and nothing was going to stop that, no matter who was going to be there and what details were not perfect. And that’s when it occurred to me that I was actually taking away from my own excitement by scrambling to try to control a situation I couldn’t control.
- We went from painstakingly agonizing over every little detail to make sure it was all perfect, to just being able to let it all go and being so thankful that this long-awaited day we had been eagerly praying for and waiting for was finally here. We were going to get married! We let go of a lot of the little things that didn’t really matter in the end and were truly able to just cherish the moment. Mike cried tears of relief and joy at the end of the ceremony because he couldn’t believe that we had been able to actually make it down the aisle and through the ceremony without something else unexpected happening.
- My aunt gave me a little piece of wedding advice several weeks before the wedding: something will go wrong, but the day will be perfect anyway. And that was absolutely true. We were so blessed to truly see an outpouring of love from all of our closest family and friends in their determination to celebrate our marriage with us, and for that, we will be forever amazed and thankful.
- We spent so much time designing our wedding favors, which was a small candle with a golden wax-sealed “S” for our last name, a favorite Bible verse, as well as matches that paid homage to our alma mater, where we met (we met at Swarthmore College, and the“Quaker Matchbox” is a common phenomenon where two Swatties end up getting married). However, what actually stole the show was the mini hand sanitizers that my parents were able to procure last-minute which were placed by the door for guests as they entered the venue! For weeks afterwards, we were getting messages from our guests saying they were still using the hand sanitizer they got from our wedding as they were not able to locate any more due to shortages in their area.
More about the planning process/design/vendors:
- The engagement ring: Mike enlisted one of my best friends and bridesmaids Anna to help pick out my engagement ring with him, so she recommended and went with him to where her husband got her ring from, a local family-owned jewelry store (Safian and Rudolph) on jewelers row in Philadelphia. It turned out that this was also the same exact place that Mike’s dad bought Mike’s mom’s ring from years ago!
- We knew we were going to have a very long engagement because of both of our school/career situations—I’m still in graduate school and we wanted to wait until Mike was done with medical school requirements, so sometime in the spring. We also knew we wanted to get married in the Philly-area because that’s where we first met in college. When we were looking for wedding venues and we found Pomme, they were not yet booked on the exact six-year anniversary of our very first date back in the spring of 2014. It was also in the town that Mike grew up in, and not far from the college where we met. We both felt that date was perfect and decided to book the venue. This was back in 2017. Little did we know that if we had even chosen a date that was one week or even one day later, our wedding likely would not have happened at all.
- Mike and I both had a very similar vision for the aesthetic of the wedding. We wanted it to be elegant and classic while keeping things simple. This made a lot of the design decisions very easy for us, like the all-white florals and neutral color palette (except our funfetti cake which was definitely not “in theme” with anything else in the wedding).
- After we decided on the date, I knew I wanted a lot of greenery and warm white florals inside to mimic the feel of a garden that was brought indoors, since it would be too cold to have an outdoor wedding. The first vendor I booked after our venue was our florist, because I was so obsessed with how they (Belovely) had transformed indoor spaces so beautifully for previous clients and events, and everything about our reception space came together even better than I had envisioned.
- We also had fun with our seating chart, where we labeled each table with a name of a different Finger Lake, since we now live by the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, rather than a table number. We wanted the wedding to feel very intimate and so we replaced the numbered-table concept with something a little more personal.
- We wavered over hiring a day-of-coordinator for a while since our venue already had an event coordinator but finally decided to do it. We had no idea how crucial this decision would be over a year later. Due to our constantly changing guest list, so much else had to be changed accordingly and at the last minute. The event staff at our venue (Pomme) and our day-of-coordination team (Something Blu) were amazing—they teamed up and really adapted with us and the situation and had everything taken care of in the background, still making rearrangements even up until the morning of the wedding.
- Planning a wedding in a state that neither of us lived in while being long-distance engaged for 2.5 years was difficult for all the logistical reasons you can think of. We needed to make all in-person decisions into a weekend trip (going cake tasting in Philadelphia while we were both a few hours away from both the city and each other!). But since we were engaged for quite a while, nothing was frantic for most of the planning process. We were able to spend some time being engaged without planning anything, but we were still able to chip away at planning slowly and steadily and have fun with it. We almost never ran into issues with vendors we were interested in already being booked for our wedding date, which was a huge plus. We also had a lot of help from family and friends, near and far, and our bridesmaids and groomsmen, whom we are immensely grateful for and could not have pulled this off without their help.
Share this story
COMMENTS Expand -