Meg Keene - A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for a Beautiful, Affordable, and Stress-free Celebration

The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband, thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own. Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions, of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.

Jane Austen, Emma

Getting married is an attempt at turning air into matter, transforming the ineffable workings of the heart into things that are real: the invitation, the dress, the ring. The words that constitute a wedding are magical incantations of the highest order. In the presence of witnesses and voiced by a vested authority, two people are pronounced a single unit. Ta-da!

Anita Diamant, Pitching My Tent

You get to a point where theres not much you can do but put on your fancy party dress and a pair of fabulous shoes and grab a bottle of cheap champagne to swig with your girls on the way to meet your person.

APracticalWedding.com comment

I first wrote this book in 2011. You might remember this as the Time Before Pinterest Exploded. But for me, it was a year and a half after our wedding, and I had been publishing APracticalWedding.com for three years. At the time, the wedding industry was in a terrible moment. I mean, its the wedding industry. Its never really been a beacon of sanity or progressive values. But 2011 was a particularly dark time. We were coming out of the depths of the Great Recession, but every wedding publication in existence assumed that people getting married had piles and piles of money to spend, a professional wedding planner, and a baseline desire to look like a puffy white cupcake. They also insisted on constantly using the phrase Your Big Day, a term that made me upset then, and still makes me upset now.

I wrote this book while simultaneously riding the high of our amazing wedding and feeling enormous rage at the wedding industry. Apparently, I was far from alone. When I first pitched this book, publishers told me nobody would want to read it. The brides publishers imaginedand they never imagined anyone but brideswanted binders filled with endless lists telling them how to have a huge wedding where they could feel like princesses. (Were they imagining brides, or confusing them with four-year-olds? It remains unclear.) But with more than one hundred thousand copies of my books sold, and countless dog-eared pages passed from hand to hand, we can now prove that they were wrong all along. All of which gives me the opportunity to update this book for todays (still kind of terrible, but now with different issues) wedding industry.

Over the past eleven years, Ive stayed on as editor-in-chief of APracticalWedding.com, which has gone from a blog being written at my kitchen table to one of the largest wedding publications in the English language. Ive been quoted in the New York Times, on NPR, on BuzzFeed, and, well, in pretty much any major publication you can think of, on how to have a reasonable wedding. I even wrote a second book called A Practical Wedding Planner (which you should get because it has all the detailed wedding information you desperately need, but that no one else wants to provide). In short, in the years since I wrote this book, Ive gone from a person who writes about weddings to a professional wedding expert.

Coming back to this book as a bona fide wedding expert has been an interesting experience. In this edition, Ive worked to share my hard-earned knowledge of why the industry is such a hot mess. But more than that, Ive tried to provide you with tools to circumnavigate that (or to at least be firm in the knowledge that youre the reasonable one). Ive also updated it to reflect the way the wedding industry has improvedbecause, believe it or not, things are getting better. These days, you no longer have to struggle through buying a bridesmaid dress in white to get an affordable wedding dress, because there are major retailers that sell exactly that (with free returns). I like to joke that in my day, you used to have to walk uphill to your wedding in the snow, and these days you can ride your quirky bicycle built for two in your hip wedding jumpsuit, singing all the way.