Wedding Wednesdays: Country Mouse or City Mouse?

Officially, Jon and I will have been engaged for 15 months and two weeks by the time our big day rolls around.  That gives us oodles of time to plan a wedding, right?  Well, sort of...

All the major bridal resources publish suggested timelines detailing when a couple needs to do which parts of putting together their day, but early on we knew we needed to get creative because I'd in the States for the majority of the planning process.  So we started planning the wedding before we were actually officially engaged - which made for some slightly awkward conversations with vendors, I can tell you!

The first big decision we faced was where to get married.  Traditionally, couples wed in the bride's hometown, but the life I shared with Jon was in England and we wanted to celebrate that.  The choice then became London, on the one hand, or the Suffolk, on the other.  I have to admit that I fought hard in London's corner, but Jon and the country won - and I'm so glad they did.  When we sat down and thought about the feel we wanted for our wedding, we realized that getting out of the city was the best option.

The phrase we kept coming back to as we started to get a sense of what we wanted was "country elegant" - country without being rustic and elegant without being glamorous.  The corner of Suffolk where Jon's family lives fits that description perfectly and we have so many lovely memories of escaping to the coast to see them; we want our guests, even those who aren't flying across an ocean to join us, to feel like they're on holiday for our wedding weekend, too.

And besides, how many old stately homes set in acres of rolling fields can you find in London?

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We talked all of this through with Jon's mother in March, and agreed that we'd go look at venues while we were in Suffolk for Easter.  Next week on Wedding Wednesdays: the search begins!