A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for a Beautiful, Affordable, and Stress-free Celebration

As a wedding planner, I read a whole lot of wedding books. I also don't like most of them. When I find one that I LOVE, of course I have to shout it out. Here's my thoughts on why you should read A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration , if you haven't already. Meg Keene is a refreshingly reasonable, calm voice in the increasingly unreasonable, frenzied genre of Wedding Planning media. A Practical Wedding is an honest, thoughtful, and thought-provoking guide for traversing the journey of planning a wedding that is sensible yet fun. Keene's voice resonates throughout the book - she comes across as that wise, sincere friend that you turn to when you need to be talked off of a ledge. As any good wedding book does, A Practical Wedding covers the standard items and etiquette that make up a wedding celebration - budget, vendor selection, ceremony considerations, and organization. However, there are several key features that set A Practical Wedding apart from the countless tomes heaped upon women as soon as someone `puts a ring on it' and catapult it into the elite category of great wedding books. History and justifying what's important. Keene takes the time to give the reader a brief history of the American wedding and point out that all the "Things You Must Have to Get Married" which you've been hearing about and stressing over are, for the most part, recent inventions. What is particularly fantastic is that after explaining that some traditions are inventions by the Wedding Industry, Keene points out to her readers that if they find meaning or enjoyment in said traditions, they should, by all means embrace them to the fullest. She gives those planning a wedding permission to do what is meaningful to them and let the rest go, and sometimes, permission from an authority is exactly what a to-be-wed needs. Gender neutrality and marriage equality. Even though the large majority of her readers will likely be brides planning to marry grooms, Keene takes great care to not alienate based upon gender or sexual preference. It is refreshing to read a wedding book that has quotes and passages from a groom's point of view as well as inclusion of same-sex weddings. To me, it's important to acknowledge that a wedding is a wedding is a wedding. A great wedding book transcends being pigeon-holed as a "straight" or "gay" wedding book. Regardless of who is marrying whom, the elements that make up a wedding do not change. Sensible DIY (or as Keene calls it DITogether). The chapter focusing on DIY projects is by far, the most in-depth and honest writing I've read on the topic. With a plethora of style blogs, magazines, and television shows bombarding to-be-weds with images of perfect, handcrafted wedding elements, it is easy to catch DIY fever, which left untreated can lead to DYI mania. Keene discusses the various reasons people DIY, how to get it done and most importantly when to let it go. Big Difficulties & Huge Conversations. Most wedding books are all flowers and table settings and pretty, pretty princess business. Before reading A PracticalWedding, I would have been hard pressed to think of a wedding planning book that actually discusses the really weighty topics like calling the whole thing off or planning in the midst of tragedy. Keene discusses the tough stuff - difficult aspects like strife, compromise and letting go. She also encourages her readers to have the important discussions necessary to forming the foundation of a solid marriage (faith, finances, values and intentions). It may not be pretty princess stuff, but these are the topics that you'll be dealing with long after the flowers have wilted and the tables have been cleared. Additionally, Keene bucks wedding book tradition and lets her readers in on some secrets that many in the wedding industry don't want anyone to know - planning a wedding is not easy, there will likely be tears & arguments, things will go wrong, and ultimately it's not about doing everything under the sun to have one perfect day but doing all that you possibly can to have one gloriously imperfect life. One of my favorite quotes from the book is: "Weddings are like most good things in life: really hard and really worth it." With all of the insight and honesty in the pages of A Practical Wedding, it just got a little easier.

This book helps with a lot of the general overview of planning, the steps to take, and what to prioritize. But the most helpful thing about it I found was how it felt more like you're hearing a confession and wisdom from Meg Keane as if she's a best friend who wants to help you at every step, stressor, and joke along the way. There's much reading advice about out there about wedding planning, budgets and To-Do lists, sure. But the author here covers the real priorities beyond the ultimately less significant stuff (looking at you, color palette!) and reminds you about your relationship with your future spouse, how to tackle hurdles you might encounter with your family during the wedding planning process, enjoy the engagement period, and the wedding itself of course. There's no "right" way to have a wedding, and Meg does a great job of helping every bride & groom to really center themselves and not lose track of the true important things during a time in life when it can feel as if every single planning decision they make is equally super important (Hint: They're not). I bought this book a few weeks after I got engaged, and read through most of it early on. I kept a lot of it in the back of my mind any time I got stressed or was unsure of what to prioritize, put on the back burner, or realize "Eh, screw it" about some little detail I might get hung up on. Huge help.

Really good book. A lot of it is just common sense - but honestly, you NEED common sense when you're wedding planning. You need a voice of reason to cut through all the BS that you hear from every vendor/family member/website/magazine/Pinterest board. It is a calm, logical voice Reading this book is the first thing I did after getting engaged and before really starting to plan my wedding. I think it's mostly helpful at the very beginning because it kind of helps you think through what you really want and develop a good attitude toward wedding planning. There aren't a lot of "concrete" wedding planning tips in here - it doesn't talk about the different types of napkin folds or how to calculate how much booze to buy or how to start the process of changing your name. What it does do it makes you think about what kind of celebration you want, and gives supportive advice for navigating the emotional drama and frustration that can come with planning.

There probably is not much I can say that hasn't already been said. But Meg deserves all of these words of praise, and gratitude, so I will do my best to sum up my thoughts. There are a lot of resources out there for the soon-to-be-wed. Too many resources. Way too many. Most of them are preaching the same things, but I'm so thankful I found one that is not. When I became engaged, I put off planning our wedding for a full year, because every glance at this multitude of resources made my cringe. It was so much work that I didn't want to deal with, and didn't think I could handle. There were lists upon lists of things I could not care less about, and I don't WANT to have to care about. And the worst part of it all was that I felt like I was in high school again. Like I had to make the team, have a certain group of friends, wear certain things, drive a certain level of car, etc., just to fit in. I never wanted to fit in in high school, and I certainly don't now either. So it stressed me out. I don't want to have a wedding like everyone else, and not even one like everyone that is trying to not be like everyone else. So, we thought the best alternative to all of this was to just say 'screw it', and do our own thing. Well, as we dove into planning our elopement, I realized it didn't feel right. I started researching, and stumbled upon A Practical Wedding's website. I have never looked back. I bought the book immediately, devoured it, and devoured it a second time. I felt the biggest sense of relief and comfort as I read through the pages. I felt as if I was sitting on my couch with an old friend, who just so happens to be very well versed in all things wedding, and she was encouraging, and supportive, and full of great ideas. Just what I needed. We stopped in our tracks, and completely re-planned the whole thing. I learned what a wedding actually means, and how it's not just about legalities. I really had no emotional ties to our wedding up until that point, it was just something we were doing. Now, the amount of excitement, and gratitude I have about what we are doing is immeasurable. I honestly think our whole wedding process would have been okay without this discovery, but it would not have been us. We now have found a way to incorporate our lives, our loved ones, and our favorite things into our wedding. It's becoming a community celebration, and a fantastic send off into our new little family we'll be forming. A Practical Wedding has taught me about tradition, meaning behind things, why we have weddings, how to survive the planning process, planning without going broke, how to fully enjoy the day (and the many days after), that my wedding is NOT an imposition on anyone in my life, and SO much more. For all of this, I am eternally grateful. I have learned so much about myself during this process, and about what our marriage and our future means to me. This book is priceless to me, and if you are planning a wedding, I don't think you should go without it. I've been doing nothing but spreading the word about this book to everyone I know, and I will recommend it to any bride that I meet. The least I can do is offer up what it gave me to the Amazon community. Thank you Meg, I am so grateful.

I love weddings, I really do. I love wedding related movies and TV shows, I've been a professional wedding photographer for the last 5 years, I read wedding blogs and I just got engaged myself. So you would think that in the midst of this wedding love fest, I would be having the easiest time ever planning my wedding. I mean, I should be an old pro at this, right? But I wasn't. I froze, I panicked, I started getting swept up in all the things I had to do, everything I needed my wedding to be, all the things that needed to be considered. The logistics, the budget, the invite list, and non-stop questions from family and friends about when, where, and for the love of god, WHAT ARE MY COLORS??? In trying to put together a totally chilled out, relaxed, non-traditional super fun party, I ended becoming bizarrely neurotic and ridiculously stressed out and I lost sight of the things that were most important. A Practical Wedding brought me back to my senses. Step by step, the book aims to guide you through the process of becoming engaged, all the way through to after you are married. It covers everything from figuring out the important logistical things like booking vendors and choosing a venue as well as the trickier wedding related issues such as juggling different faiths, working with families, and managing expectations. But that's not the real strength of this book. The real strength and heart of the book, is that throughout the book from beginning to end, A Practical Wedding zeroes in on the real core of a wedding. What that means for you, and the celebration you choose to have with your loved ones. What is a wedding? That's the questions that I really considered when reading the book. Just completely forgetting all the weddings I've been to, and the way weddings are presented in the media, I had to answer that question. What is a wedding to me and my fiance and how do I want it to manifest for us? And once I answered that question, you cannot believe the sense of relief that I felt. The book asks you, what is important to YOU? How do you want to feel on your wedding day? What traditions do YOU want to honor and why? The book prompts you to listen to what your heart is saying is right for you. APW also acknowledges the incredible range of emotions associated with wedding planning, rather than glossing over the sad, frustrated bits. Another reviewer quoted a bit in the book about the wedding industry trying to sell the idea of a perfect wedding and all the MUST DO things that comes along with that perfect wedding. And I do agree that many times, the wedding industry can be a behemoth like beast that's hard to fight against. But I sort of wish the book had touched a little bit more (it does to a small extent) about how there are many many wedding vendors who can provide amazing products, services, and even guidance to couples getting married, without trying to sell the idea of a mythical perfect wedding. But as a wedding vendor, I do admit this is my bias showing. ;) It's my only small criticism of the book. A Practical Wedding, both the book and the blog, tackle things that are so rarely talked about within the wedding industry. As a future bride, I loved this book, but I'd also recommend it to those who may not be getting married themselves, but family members, grooms, best friends. Because it takes too long for me to be like, "Listen! Listen to this bit, this is EXACTLY how I felt! Oh! This part is so spot on, let me read it to you..." Might as well just gift the book to everyone I know! It's insanely practical, but also deeply moving. When I started to really get into the meat of the book, I had tears in my eyes because of the heartfelt stories, and also because the advice given in the book triggered a strong emotional reaction. I'm getting married! It's a beautiful thing and the book honors that extraordinarily well.

I've been reading A Practical Wedding, the blog, since my engagement in early 2009. I'm not sure how I stumbled across it, but somehow, in my search of wedding blogs to consume my time and give me ideas on my own wedding planning, I found Meg as she was planning her wedding, and was struck by her wisdom. This was a woman who had her head screwed on straight: a woman who understood that it's about the commitment, not the décor; it's about the people, not the "pretty." Here's the thing about the APW blog: it is updated daily with information, inspiration, words of wisdom, and discussion. There is so much goodness in the blog that you could get lost in there for days, chasing links and discovering the smart things that other people have discovered in their own wedding -- and life -- experiences. The A Practical Wedding book distills this wisdom into a 200-page guidebook of sorts, in the order that you will probably need the information. It paces you through the engagement, the hows of planning a celebration that is uniquely yours, the ways of dealing with the pressures of planning such an event, to the wedding-day comedown and honeymoon. I honestly wish this book had been around when I was engaged, because the introduction itself summed up a dozen lessons I learned while planning and I could have saved myself some grief, thinking I was "the only one" dealing with these stresses. In the first chapter, Meg says, "You're going to need some touchstones of sanity during this process." I can see engaged couples reading this book from cover to cover when they first get it, in anticipation of figuring out what is to come, and then using the book as a bible throughout each step of the wedding-planning process. This book WILL BE a touchstone of sanity. When you get derailed by something judgmental your Aunt Muriel said, or you feel inadequate because your wedding doesn't look like something perfectly styled on the pages of a magazine or wedding blog, and you start to reevaluate and question your choices, this book will set you back on the path to stability and reason. The wedding industry is here to sell you things, and tries to convince engaged couples that if they don't get it they are doing themselves, their guests, and their wedding a disservice. But Meg tells us -- and has other sane, practical brides and grooms joining the discussion with their wedding experiences -- that you should focus on your priorities and that we can take or leave the rest. The book will save you money. It will save you a lot of grief trying to understand and control your budget. It will save you some tears (though not all, because wedding-planning is bound to make even the strongest of us break down at least once). Most importantly, it will help you to shape your wedding into something that reflects you as a couple, and will guide you towards that goal in manageable steps while following the path of least resistance. Seriously. Buy this book.

Quick summary of the book's message: "Your wedding is yours. Do what you want to do. People who sell wedding stuff like to make you feel like you need to spend more than you actually do. " It's an entertaining, quick read. Overall the main thing I gained by reading this book was a renewed sense of "I can make my wedding whatever I want it to be, and it will be awesome." Beyond that, some of the wedding tradition history outlined in this book could probably be read on Wikipedia. If you feel like you need somebody to tell you that your wedding can be whatever you want it to be, this book may make sense for you. If not, I wouldn't buy this book. The information you need likely is available for free on the internet already.

I'm a professional wedding planner. When I first started planning weddings five years ago (for friends, I had no idea at the time that I'd one day be doing this professionally) I read pretty much every wedding planning book I could get my hands on that didn't seem totally insane, because that's what I do when I want to learn about something - I read. And while I picked up some helpful pieces here and there, there was not a single book that I loved overall. I wish that this book had been around then. Now, I didn't learn anything from this book, but that's because, well, I now do this professionally. However, if you're not a professional wedding planner? You will learn things. Good things. Things like how to find an affordable venue, and that it's OK to sometimes cry during the planning process, and why you should focus on your ceremony, and when and why you need to ask for help. It's a wedding planning book that manages to deal with both logistics (important! weddings are full of logistics, and they are often overwhelming) and, probably even more importantly, also deals with the often intense emotional logistics around weddings and marriages. It reminds you that your wedding is not just a big party, it is the start of your marriage. So go buy it, and buy a copy for your mother, and copies for all of your friends who are getting married. This book is definitely my new go-to engagement party gift. If you are a regular reader of the APW blog, rest assured that it's different than the website. The book walks you through wedding planning from engagement to post-honeymoon, all in a concise, smart, practical way. It pulls from many of the wisest posts on the site, but is in fact an entirely new piece of work that is valuable in an entirely different way to anyone who's planning a wedding. The wedding industry in America gets a bad rap for a reason - it's generally full of people and organizations who are trying to get you to buy more, do more, stress more. Couples who are getting married need all the help they can get in getting away from this - it's insidious, and can trap even the most sane, laid back people into thinking that they have to do things a certain way, because it's a wedding and it has to be perfect. My favorite line in the book is tied between "There is a whole wedding marketing machine set up to sell you the perfect wedding, but the reality is, things are going to go wrong on your wedding day. That's fine. It's great, even. It's the imperfections that make the day yours." and (a quote from a real-life former bride) "I honestly just gave it up to Jesus. I mean, WWJD anyway? He wouldn't stress about anyone handing out some program fans, I'll bet you that much." Truth.

'A Practical Wedding' really strips weddings back to their roots and and encourages the bride (or groom) to think beyond the kind of details that wedding magazines tell us are all-important. Split into categories for planning, budgeting, DIY and lots more practical advice plus lots of real-life stories and practical tips and emotional support, this book has basically saved my sanity while planning my own wedding. If you feel worried that you aren't getting anywhere with your planning and feel overwhelmed at the enormity of the occasion then this book is definitely for you. In fact, even if you are breezing through wedding planning buy this book anyway as it is an enjoyable read for anyone planning a wedding and makes so many valid points that you can't help but be inspired.

Most essential wedding book of all time.

Ideas prácticas . Muy util. Ejemplos entretenidos. Muy fácil de leer. Lo utilicé en su momento y ahora fue para un regalo con mucho éxito !

Great book if you enjoy reading about things before you do them. Can really help you find out what is important to you, what priorities each off you have, stop you from making unnecessary mistakes, deal with each others families asf. We just preferred figuring that stuff on our own and my husband thought it too cheesy. Better than a lot of stuff out there and definitely realistic.

This book was recommended to me at a wedding I attended last weekend, and man, I wish I had known about it from the beginning of my engagement! What a difference it could have made to the planning process! But even just two weeks out from my wedding date, I'm grateful to have it in hand, and it is proving extremely useful despite the short time frame. I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone who wants to reduce wedding stress, focus on the joy, and have a wedding that actually suits them, without breaking the bank.