Wedding season brings about lots of opportunities for wedding toasts and other speeches, so if you’re a bride or groom, Best Man, Maid of Honor, parents of the bride or groom or other honored guest, check out my Top Wedding Toasts Mistakes to Avoid post on Wedding Scoops!
Bethenny Frankel has some fabulous gift ideas! She’s the new face of CafePress.com, and I absolutely love the yoga mat from her holiday gift selections…but I see that as a great ‘Welcome to the Wedding’ gift that you can give to the ladies you’ll ask to be your bridemaids! If you haven’t picked your bridesmaids yet, or if you’re looking for a creative, fun way to ask your VIPs to be your bridesmaids, give them a welcome gift when you ask them! Everybody loves a useful gift, especially one with celebrity panache!
Check out Bethenny’s other top gift picks at CafePress.com — and of course a bottle of Skinnygirl Margaritas is always a great way to invite your bridesmaids into the party that is your wedding-planning season!
What are you doing on Monday, November 15th? Come to the most glamorous, celebrity-attended wedding show of the year, where I will be appearing as Caneel Bay’s wedding spokesperson! So many big names will be there — Colin Cowie, Sylvia Weinstock, Michelle Rago, and on and on. Here’s a list of the participating companies and experts (so far!):
The Wedding Salon – New York, NY
| Show date: | Monday November 15, 2010 |
| Show hours: | 4 PM to 9 PM |
| Venue: | Manhattan Center Studios |
| Address: | 311 West 34th Street New York, NY 10001 |
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Participants
It’s summer, and that means wedding season! While everyone loves the cake, the great food, the dancing, the chance to dress up in Gucci or Chanel and wow their partners, it’s the *relationship* that is at the center of the day. It means the world to the wedding couple, and if you’re married, you may be thinking about your own wedding day and your own relationship right now…perhaps moreso with each wedding you attend.
Just look at Tori & Dean…they planned the wedding for the guncles and then another wedding for Tori’s friend…and they really started to focus on how career and parenthood and motorcycles were putting some distance between them. Long story short, they put their relationship first, and they renewed their wedding vows, bringing their kids into the celebration.
Heidi Klum and Seal renew their vows every year, and this year had all of their guests dressing up like brides and grooms.
As fun as these celebrity vow renewals are, with their parties and the kids and the cameras and the themes, I’m thinking about a wonderful couple who renewed their vows alone on a mountaintop, in the quiet of nature, just wanting to express their *gratitude* for one another. That’s it. No themes. No cake. No Chanel.
They’re among the couples featured in my book Renewing Your Wedding Vows, and their story will inspire you if you wish to skip the big, fancy wedding re-do and just walk outside today to renew your vows under the tree in your front yard. I wish I could tell you that that couple was married for 75 years. They loved each other enough to be married that long. But Craig passed away recently, leaving Susanne without him now…comforted by the memories of their annual vow renewals and the words of love they took the time to speak to one another.
So it doesn’t matter how you do it. It doesn’t matter if you book the Plaza or climb a mountain to be alone. Just say the words. I have tons of inspiration here in my book, lots of quotes and ideas on how you can make Renewing Your Vows a meaningful part of your relationship, a refresher each year.
And if you’re not yet married, tell your parents and your married friends about it, about how simple it is to renew your vows and just ‘have a moment’ together, or re-do the wedding they never got to have — maybe a couple’s getaway for a tropical vow renewal, or a trip to Vegas…or a walk out to that tree in the front yard. With nobody looking on. And an Entenman’s cupcake to celebrate.
