Archive for June, 2009

Starting like a lot of other wedding dances, the happy couple are doing the common “turn around slowly” dance.
However, Brian and Katie had other ideas for their wedding day, and now it appears that over 7,000,000 people have enjoyed it too.

Their video was uploaded to YouTube and has since been watched by people all over the globe, entertained by Brian and Katie’s “unique” funny wedding dance.

Busting their killer moves in a 6 minute melody of their favourite tunes, the happy couple have really started married life having great fun as a couple.

Watch the wedding dance below.

Click here for lots more brilliant funny wedding videos

Will you be entertaining your wedding guests like this on your special day ? What do you think of their wedding dance ? Let us know with your comments below.

Stumbled accross this photo of a brilliant wedding cake topper today – thought we should share it with you.

Save the Date ideas

The idea of “Save the Date” cards is a simple yet very effective way of announcing to your future wedding guests that they shouldn’t book any holidays or make arrangements for your wedding date.

Often official invites only get sent out a few months before the wedding day, and with summer weddings, you don’t want to find out your nearest and dearest have booked their two week holiday right on top of your special day.

A good and affordable idea of making a Save the Date stick in someone’s mind is to have personalised fridge magnets printed. This way the recipient will place the magnet in the heart of their home and be reminded of the wedding regularly.

Personalised Fridge Magnets

Search Ebay for sellers that will design and print your personalised Save the Date fridge magnet – give them a few basic details, like your names, and the date of the wedding, and within a week or so they can be delivered to your door.

Save the Date Fridge Magnets

Another unique and fun idea for making your personalised Save the Date fridge magnets comes from beau-coup.com who make custom caricature save the date magnets.

Using their clever system, you just email them a nice photo of the bride and groom to be, and they make the personalised save the date fridge magnets with caricatures of you both. Not only do they look wonderful, your wedding guests will want to save them for years to come.

You get to choose your own background on them to make them look as funky as possible, and add the details you wish to remind your wedding guests about.

So if you’re looking for personalised Save the Date fridge magnets take a look at these and let us know how you get on – we’d love to see the likeness they achieve on your magnets !

Just when you think the global recession is affecting large and lavish wedding planning around the world, a story like this one pops up….

Rent wedding guests

With the Japanese wedding season in full swing, instead of cutting corners in the wedding planning, Japanese couples are now renting fake family and friends to boost the size of their wedding day and presumably make themselves look more popular then they actually are.

Many people in Japan see their wedding as a very formal event, which must be attended by as many friends, family and colleagues as possible.
The story stems from the fact that at a wedding in Japan, your boss may make a speech, your friends put on some sort of stage show as entertainment and your family greet the wedding guests.
The trouble is, if you’ve got little friends, a small family and not too many colleagues, you look like someone with little importance.

Make yourself look popular on your wedding day

That’s where Hiroshi Mizutant comes in, he runs Tokyo based Office Agents that rents fake friends to brides and grooms who want to look popular and important on their wedding day.

“We’ll attend the wedding as your friend instead of your friend,” Hiroshi told Reuters.

“Suddenly, a guest might not be able to make it. Or maybe you are concerned about the gap in the number of guests you have compared to your partner. Or, there are many temp workers these days and they may be uncomfortable inviting the boss.”

For the price of 20,000 yen (around £200) – you can rent one of their staff to attend your wedding ceremony. If just turning up isn’t enough for you, then splash out another 5,000 yen and they’ll perform at the wedding by singing or dancing. For 35,000 yen the hired help will make a heart rendering speech about how wonderful you are. Presumably prepared well in advance, and not a 5 minute rambling about having just met you a moment ago.

You may think that as the recession hits Japan, the idea of wasting more money on hiring fake co-workers for your wedding would put people off, but it’s actually having an opposite effect. Work related requests are on the rise, as bosses may of lost their jobs, or team mates moved on.

Fake friends for your wedding

Mizutani stated that at one wedding, his company provided the groom with all 30 of his family, friends and co-workers purely because it was his 2nd wedding and wished to avoid inviting the same wedding guests a second time.

With about 100 requests for fake wedding guests each year, the company has around 1,000 fakers ready to stand in at any occasion, including funerals and training seminars.

“What’s important is that these are normal people… normal as in they are cheery and clean and look like they have regular jobs,” Mizutani said.

There have even been occasions when the marriage partner is totally unaware of the fake wedding guests.

“People are proud and they don’t want to tell their partner that they do not have many friends,” Mizutani said.

So if you’re planning your wedding budget, would you consider making yourself look popular by spending money on people acting as your friends?

Follow this link for other world wedding traditions

If you’re reading this in Japan (or anywhere else) then please leave a comment below…..

When sending out your wedding invitations, it’s fully acceptable to enclose information for guests about how to find the wedding venue, local hotels and local taxi numbers, but some brides and grooms find it uncomfortable enclosing a wedding gift list, while others it seems write a wedding list packed full of the latest equipment for your home.

Engaged couples once used to worry about enclosing their wedding list along with the invitation. No one wanted to seem greedy or pushy. In the 80′s, couples made photocopied typed lists of the latest heated hostess trolleys, slow cookers and maybe the odd toasted sandwich maker.
Wedding lists from the 90′s asked for new microwaves and classic toasters, but today’s Mr & Mrs 2B are a little more extravagant when it comes to their wedding lists.
According to latest information from John Lewis and Debenhams, engaged couples choose to litter their list with some expensive technology. Today’s wedding lists are said to include Sony Bravia digital TV’s and top of the range mp3 sound decks to name just a couple.
Forgetting the need for saucepans, towels and a kettle, it seems the modern bride probably has these things already and really wants an upgrade on their flashy gadgets, courtesy of their wedding guests.

Tracey Yates, senior analyst at John Lewis said “Two years ago, the top 20 products on the gift list were exclusively traditional items from linens, kitchenware, china and glass, but, in the second half of last year, the Nintendo Wii sports pack made it to the top 20.”

Debenhams too agreed with John Lewis that the most requested gifts on their wedding guest lists are now iPods, widescreen plasmas, and gift vouchers. With Digital photo frames replacing the once traditional silver frames.

The tradition of wedding gifts in the UK actually stems from the father of the bride, who once gave his new son in law a gift or some money. This, along with lots of other wedding traditions, have been completely changed over the years with newlyweds enjoying plenty of new gifts for the home.
The idea of a wedding gift list, back in the day before emails, websites, and even companies like John Lewis and Debenhams offering wedding guest gift lists, was that each guest was expected to cross off what they’d buy, and forward on in the post to the next name on the list. If someone held onto it for too long, it became a bit of a pain, but it did ensure there weren’t duplicated gifts, with brides ending up with 4 or 5 toasters.

So when you’re planning your wedding gift list, consider things that will stand the test of time (like your marriage hopefully) and leave the plastic controllers or iPod speakers for your own personal purchases, you’ll only be discarding them in a couple of years anyway. After all, is there any romance in a new Sat Nav ??

In our last post we were looking at the costs faced by wedding guests attending your wedding day, but this story completely shadows the £600 odd quid, leaving the wedding guests roughly £3,250 out of pocket for the privilege of celebrating your big day.

The reason for this high cost is that Noah & Erin have chosen a rather odd weightlessness wedding on-board an aircraft at the Cape Canaveral centre in Florida USA.

The couple will exchange vows in a specially designed jet that can simulate weightlessness similar to the feeling created by a spaceship in orbit.

Noah Fulmar, 31 will offer Erin Finnegan, 30, a wedding ring, specially made of fragments of a meteorite that crashed into the Earth 30,000 years ago.

Recently we reported EasyJet weddings planned by the airline company, which have since be refused by their local authority. But in Florida it seems, not only can you get married on a jet, but one that includes 15 roller-coaster style dives where the plane plummets from 36,000 feet to 24,000 feet and then climbs back up for another 30 second weightless drop for the bride and groom.

Son of an astronaut, Richard Garriott the British space tourist and adventurer will officiate at the ceremony during the Boeing 727 90-minute flight – the only way to experience weightlessness without heading into orbit.

The bride will apparently attend the unusual wedding ceremony by wearing a designer wedding dress, equipped with trousers to protect her modesty during weightlessness.

“Noah wanted to get married in space but we probably won’t be able to afford it for another 25 to 50 years – so I suggested this as a compromise,” she said.

Mr Fulmor admitted his mother thinks he is “absolutely nuts”.

The wedding is set for June 20th this year, and although we’ve reported some weird and wonderful weddings lately, this one could well top the list.
Having seen the making of the movie Apollo 13 where Tom Hanks describes the weightlessness process as the “spew tube” where so many of the crew and cast were sick during the 90 minute flight, we’re not entirely sure that the bride and groom have thought this through very well. The interior of the aircraft, replicates levels of weightlessness found on Mars or the Moon and has padded surfaces as travellers uncontrollably bash into the sides of the jet.

The slightly mad, but adventurous pair, who met at a science fiction club in their home city of New York, will honeymoon in Antarctica – hopefully on a standard flight to their destination.

No doubt the sensible brides and grooms amongst you have drawn up a wedding budget, and hopefully are managing to plan and organise your wedding comfortably within your set figures.

However, have you ever considered the cost that is faced by your wedding guests for the privileged of attending your wedding ?
A poll conducted by High Street bank Halifax suggests that in order to attend your wedding and it’s full celebrations, it could cost your friends and family an average of £624.10 each.
The poll looked at costs that a typical wedding guest will face and considered wedding gifts, hotel rooms, new outfits and travelling costs.

The bank concluded that wedding reception drinks cost an average of £43.70, wedding gifts ran up to around £100, and celebrating on the Stag or Hen parties costs £92.50, or as much as £258.50 if you were planning a weekend abroad.

The poll also found that 62% of wedding guests think that the bride and groom should consider these costs to the wedding guests before they make any decisions when planning the big day.

Head of Halifax banking Mike Regnier said: “The cost of attending other people’s weddings is often underestimated. It is clear that wedding guests are spending in order to be there for their loved ones.”

It’s a fair comment really, whilst you may of been planning and saving for your wedding for sometime your guests may not of been.
The best advice we can offer is to allow people as much time as possible to put some cash aside. If you’re planning a Hen night or Stag weekend that is going to be expensive, consider setting up a savings account and ask your friends to pay a set amount in there each month, perhaps enough to cover the hotel or the flight.

Whilst the country is experiencing financial upset, don’t make your wedding guests feel bad, or even worse, they may have to turn down some of the celebrations to be able to afford to attend.

Is the Credit Crunch affecting your wedding plans ? Vote in our poll in the right hand column of this article….>