Wedding Planning 101: Holiday weekend weddings

By Weddingistas, on May 31st, 2010

Today is Memorial Day and I plan on enjoying the beautiful weather momentarily along with everyone else. But I wanted to share some thoughts on holiday weekend weddings and the controversy that surrounds them.

Here’s the thing, it can either be great or devastating (ok, that might be a little dramatic, but still bad) news to some of your guests and wedding attendants.

There’s a number of reasons 3-day weekends are ideal for weddings:

You can get married on a Sunday and pretend it’s a Saturday while enjoying reduced rates.
Your anniversary will always be around the long holiday weekend.
The extra day off from work can ease the travel for you & your guests.

There’s a number of reasons 3-day weekend are NOT ideal for your guests:

When you work a 9-5 job, you cherish those rare days off.
Note above reasoning – they will feel obligated to spend it at your wedding.
Pretty much wherever you go, there’s always traffic on holiday weekends.
Spending time traveling to and from wedding events, hotels, dinners, etc is not exactly relaxing.
Some people actually want to spend their Memorial or Labor Day celebrating the day with traditional family picnics and/or parades.

If people are annoyed about the wedding date, they probably won’t even tell you. But don’t worry, they’ll get over it because they’ll want to be with you celebrating in your big day.

Bottom line is that you’re never going to please everyone, so just do what makes you happy.

http://mybridalbouquet.wordpress.com/ Jenna

We’ve getting married over a long weekend – we have a lot of people traveling far distances who might not have been able to take the time off otherwise – and because we knew some people would have annual plans, we made sure to let people know WELL in advance of the date. That way, our potential guests had lots of warning (Save the Dates by December for a July wedding – with word of mouth well before that!) that we’d be using that weekend to get married so they’d have a chance to decide if they were going to participate or not. I think long weekends are a fine choice – just give lots of warning or you will end up with grumpy guests or a lot of no’s!
http://www.ishafossevents.com isha | isha foss events

Great post!
http://stitchesbykaty.blogspot.com Stitches By Katy

Not a fan of holiday weddings. I get the point with the extra days off, but I would much rather spend my time with family actually celebrating the holiday. This dislike probably stems from the fact that my bday is the day after Christmas and I hate to share my other holidays with other occassions. However, they are nice when you have that extra day off work!
http://www.limo805.com Claire Anderson

These are really great suggestions. I used to work 8 hours a day for 5 days and the 2 days off are really sacred to me. It just makes good sense. Thanks.