Useless needs?

This is great info... I am thinking to keep ceremony decor to a bare minimum. The church is already so gorgeous, I feel like sticking my purple flowers everywhere would cheapen it a but.

Flowers. Loved them but we went on our honeymoon right away so didn't get to enjoy them! We asked people to take them as the favour, but not everyone did (most of our guests were from out of town, so it's hard to take a plant on the plane!)

I stuck to minimal decor which I'm glad because hardly any of the decor wound up in pictures. And the decor I had we used for the ceremony first, then friends brought it in to the reception.

We left out a lot of things as well that we didn't miss.

We didn't do:

escort or place cards (just had a seating chart)

menu (we had a buffet and the venue provided labels for everything)

program for the ceremony

DJ (spotify playlist worked well for us! I know this is controversial though!)

Bouquet/garter toss

Cake

Signs (things like choose a seat, not a side, unplugged ceremony, bride and groom, this way to I do, etc). We had a few in the reception for the guest book, cards, seating chart, bar menu, and we actually just printed those off on nice paper.

Colourful linens. Just used the white linens the venue provided, no table runners or sashes or chair covers. Again, very few, if any, pictures of this stuff. Once people are sitting in chairs, you don't know what they look like!

Thank you ladies, that's very helpful! i'm trying not to spend too much so cutting these type of things out should be no problem

We cut a lot of things out - so I didn't regret it. We were happy we left certain things out:

- Didn't do corsages for the mums or boutonnieres for the groomsmen (we did give one to each dad though my father in law didn't even wear his I realized after!)

- Didn't do a bouquet toss

- Didn't have a lot of decor, kept it very simple

- Didn't have a cake

At the end of the day, don't worry about the instagram type wedding shots. I got really hung up on that at one point, but who gives a poop in the end.

From what I've heard... those little "extras" are what add up, and don't make or break your day... just break the bank!

Some examples:

- "bride & groom" chair signs (no one sees them, and you'll have maybe one photo of them)
- ceremony programs (if you're not doing anything specific in your ceremony, or religious ceremony, people don't need to know the names of your bridal parties)
- favours (you don't have to completely opt out, but keep them very inexpensive if you do any)
- ceremony decor (keep it minimal... it's 30 minutes of the day!)
- chair covers & sashes (if you venue's chairs are awful, maybe get covers, but save $$$ and leave the sashes)
- custom anything (it may be cute to you... but your guests don't think twice if something has your initials monogrammed on it)

Overall, start from the basics, and really take a second look at all of the "extras"... they add up fast! And your day can probably do without most of them.