Difficulty: Moderately Easy
Things You’ll Need:
- Flowers Petals
- Wedding Party Favors
- English Wedding Cakes
Step1
Hold your ceremony at your local parish.
Step2
Plan your reception in a hotel or restaurant or select a more unusual licensed venue, such as a castle, yacht club, pier or football field.
Step3
Select a theme for your wedding so that it all coordinates and sets your wedding apart from other events. It might be as simple as a color you incorporate into your dress and decorations, or it could be based on your profession or interests (such as a military wedding).
Step4
Request traditional wedding music, such as one of the favorite processionals, the "Wedding March" from Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream."
Step5
Begin the celebration on the way to the wedding by having young girls sprinkle flower petals on the ground to decorate the path to your new life.
Step6
Prepare a horseshoe with ribbons that the bride can carry in the crook of her arm for good luck.
Step7
Order a traditional English wedding cake, which is white with a fruitcake base. It is typically made of raisins, ground almonds and cherries and topped with marzipan (a special candy decoration).
Step8
Place favors on top of the cake that you can hand out to guests.
Step9
Save the top tier of the cake, which is called the christening cake, to serve at your first child's baptismal ceremony.
Step10
Give a certificate of notice to the superintendent registrar of your district that you intend to be married. (If you and your fiance live in different districts, you must each do this separately.)
Step11
Understand that you are required to have lived in the district for more than 7 days before you can apply. Then there is another wait of 21 days before the marriage can take place.
Step12
Remember that the total cost to cover the attendance of the Superintendent of Registrar and the wedding service will vary from place to place.
Comments
Anonymous said
on 11/22/2005 Remember, it's not appropriate for men to wear black tie (tuxedos) to a daytime English wedding. This is considered evening dress. Wear a morning suit if you have one, but most guests will be in lounge suits.
Women needn't wear long dresses to daytime weddings. Most guests will be in tea-length outfits, with a jacket or wrap they can discard after the ceremony.
Hats are more popular than you'd think, especially at weddings in high summer.
Bear in mind that many English village churches are unheated.
At some villages in England and Wales, local children bar the way of the couple as they leave the churchyard. Make sure someone has some change to pay them off!
Anonymous said
on 11/22/2005 It is traditionally good luck to have a chimney-sweep at your wedding (not near the dress, I presume)!
On exiting the church, colleagues or other members of a group that the couple belong to often form a series of arches which the couple walk under (e.g. hockey players use their sticks, military people use their rifles, and most traditionally, morris dancers use sticks decorated with flowers).