Wedding How-To Books

When I'm stuck for inspiration on what to write here I turn to the New York Times wedding pages. All those fancy society weddings make me feel so deliciously snarky. Plus they have a pretty good archive of "field note" articles pertaining to wedding planning, like this one:

Books Strew the Path to the Altar
By ABBY ELLIN
Published: March 11, 2007
To be sure she is hitched without a glitch, Sarah Cartwright has spent $150 for books on advice, planning and etiquette for her wedding on June 7.

Being a budget-conscious bride who's also a book-ophile, I was conflicted about that $150 price tag. I'd love to spend that much money on books. I myself purchased a couple books to help get me started with my planning. (I literally had no idea how to start planning a wedding.) But your head will spin and nothing will get planned if you take every bit of advice literally. If you are a book person on a budget you can get away with one or two books, and then everything else you need to know is instinct. Or for free online somewhere. (I've always thought that how-to-save-money books should start with the line, "If you're on a budget, then I hope you got this book from the library or used bookstore instead of paying full retail price for it.")

There's no question that wedding book publishing has become part of the Wedding Industry, so much so that there are anti-bride guide books and books criticizing the other books. And any celebrity can slap her name and picture on a book and make the reader feel like intimate celebrity wedding secrets are being shared.

My books. Someone gave me a wedding crafts book. I purchased an Anti-Bride guide and "Everything Weddings on a Budget," both of which I recently gave away to another bride. I also bought "Emily Post on Etiquette" and "Emily Post on Weddings," just for the olde-timey fun of it. It seems like a fairly paltry collection compared to some brides, but they provided more information than I ended up using.

What wedding books are you using?

Book Review- Gone with the Groom

We don’t review many items here at Flaming Tulle unless you count wedding favor ideas. So when author Janice A. Thompson’s PR people asked if I would like to review her latest book, Gone with the Groom, I thought- Whew! A post topic I don’t have to come up with myself. Ha. Really, I thought what a wonderful idea! I love reading and I love weddings so a book about a wedding mystery might be fun!

First things first, don’t read the acknowledgements. I did and I quickly figured out the story line and outcome of the book. I also noticed that all the chapter titles were song titles and that this book is serious on sap. There’s lots of ‘feel the love’ goodness as well as ‘I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family....’ stuff going on here. Annie the main character and MOB (mother of the bride) is quite possibly the most laid back MOB I’ve ever heard about. She is the quiet in the storm when the groom goes missing and the wedding plans begin to fall apart just like her daughter Brandi falls apart. A bride would be hard pressed to find a better MOB than Annie. I enjoyed the little tidbits of advice she gives to other MOB’s throughout the book a lot. All of it is very good and accurate.

This Christian-based book is high on fluff and good feelings. I struggled with how some parts of the book seemed unrealistic, but overall the book’s pace is quick and the writing is good. I read a lot of mysteries and I’ve read books by bigger authors (Patterson) whose characters become mythic in proportions as the writing goes downhill with each formulaic twist and turn. Gone with the Groom does not do that. The plot is fun and the characters are enjoyable and it will easily pass your time. Gone with the Groom is the second installment in Thompson’s collection of Annie Patterson mysteries. Her books remind me of Diane Mott Davidson’s a bit and I found myself liking Annie purely based on the fact that she reminded me a lot of Davidson’s mystery solving caterer Goldy. I devour those books like candy so Thompson is in good company creating a character akin to Goldy.

Gone with the Groom is a fun, easy read. It’s engaging and might help a bride or two relax and take a breather from all her own planning hullabaloo. I recommend picking up a copy if you like mysteries on the light side of things.

You can purchase this book and other wedding books here.

"Say Yes" follow-up

I actually haven't had a chance to watch Say Yes to the Dress yet, but I just saw a commercial for it and remembered that Vicky posted about it. I was interested in watching it, but I've been reading One Perfect Day and just got to the chapter about wedding dresses and it's a real eye opener. Since I didn't step foot in a single bridal salon for my dress, I had no idea why women were told they had to buy their dresses so many months in advance. Alterations should take a couple weeks, not 6 months or more. So why does it take so long to get a wedding dress?

Bridal salons are in the market of selling the princess idea along with the idea that there's one perfect dress just for you (just like there's one perfect soulmate for you). When you try on the dresses in the salon, you're trying on samples meant for dozens of women to try on. Then they order the dress for you, giving you the sense that this dress is being made for you and you alone. And in a sense that's true in that it's not made until you order it. But, when the order comes through to the Asian wedding dress factory, it's still being made in a generic, cookie-cutter size. It has little to do with your actual measurements. Those measurements come in to play once the dress arrives back at the salon and they have the tailor fret over you to make the dress perfectly yours. This is such a manufactured scam. There's no practical reason why they can't keep different sizes in stock to sell you, like any other clothing store. It's just that "off-the-rack" appears "cheap," and you'll spend more money on that special made-just-for-you feeling. And it keeps the dress making costs down in that they're producing the cookie-cutter sizes instead of unique sizes (so, cheaper for the business but they don't exactly pass the savings on to the consumers).

Business consultants advise dress salespeople to avoid "untraditional" or "unconventional" brides because they will lose patience with the process and won't spend money on the wedding dress dream. Heaven forbid a woman wants to be practical about her wedding dress! That's bad for business. That's partially where David's Bridal comes in, in that you can theoretically buy a dress one morning and wear it that afternoon. As you can imagine, bridal salon owners abhor David's Bridal because they are ruining the "one perfect dress" sales pitch, I mean dream. (Although David's Bridal isn't perfect either. They are a business filling a niche, re-scripting the bridal dream.)

Reading this book has fueled a number of rants that I'm working on for further posts.

Book: Somebody Is Going to Die...

Somebody Is Going to Die if Lilly Beth Doesn't Catch That Bouquet: The Official Southern Ladies' Guide to Hosting the Perfect Wedding by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays

"As necessary as the groom might be for the proper Delta wedding, a Southern girl must never--nevah!--be congratulated upon obtaining one. To do so is an insult to the whole of Southern womanhood."

This book is quite amusing, but I can't help but think it would have been even funnier if I weren't Yankee-born. It's part study, part satire of the lengths Southern women, particularly mothers of the bride in the Mississippi Delta region, will go through to put on the perfect wedding. (There are some translations and explainations for Yankees.) It's told with juicy bits of gossip interspersed, as if you're sitting down to bourbon-laced punch with the ladies.

One really neat thing is that menues and recipes are included for certain types of weddings and the events surrounding them: traditional last Delta wedding, wedding brunch, Baptist wedding, wedding cakes, shotgun wedding, etc. I didn't realize it until just now, but it's along the lines of Amy Sedaris's "I Like You" in that it contains useful information on etiquette and traditions but it's wrapped up with a nice big satirical bow.

Book Review: Altared

"The overt messsage in the bridal industry is that your wedding is the most important day of your life."

Altared, edited by Colleen Curran, is a collection of essays by strong female writers about their weddings. They are the type of women who for the most part didn't have the princess dream wedding as little girls and either found themselves surprisingly swept up in the fantasy or rebelling against it furiously.

I loved it. Of course, it validated my belief that the wedding is just one day and the marriage is supposed to last forever, so the marriage is what you should put more effort into. It's nice to know women have been thinking like this for a few years now.

I started wondering though... what if the antibride movement is perpetuating the myth of the bridezilla industry? The antibride industry wants to make money, too, obviously, or it wouldn't be hyped up in the way nothing has been since Generation X. But then I remember creepy Precious Moments cake toppers and think that the antibrides have it right. As long as those things are still being bought by someone, there's still a bridal industry to rail against.

That tangent aside, this really was an entertaining read, and all true tales from real women. One woman called off her wedding. A widow remarried. One woman writes of her arranged marriage that fell apart when her husband finally revealed he was gay (and in the community's eyes the bad marriage was all her fault). A woman writes about her and her partner's anguish over whether they should have a wedding or not, since as lesbians they feel they can probably never be legally married. There's a wedding for everyone in this book.

I know summer reading is over, but these are brief essays that you can read during commuting train rides or quiet moments at home. Check it out.

One Perfect Day

If the wedding industry has any say in your wedding day, it's that it is the pinnacle of your life thus far, your shining moment, the "perfect" day. We, as women, and consumers in our culture, get caught up in this mess and to date this industry is bringing in $161 billion! When I heard this my heart stopped. $161 billion?!

Where did I get this heart stopping, cringe inducing information? From Rebecca Mead's new book, "One Perfect Day- The Selling of the American Wedding". While the book isn't out yet (May 2007), it is already causing waves. The Washington Post picked it up and ran a story on it a few weeks back and the book is being touted as one that exposes the heinous underbelly of the bridezilla culture. I, for one, am anxious to read a book that illustrates how we as women search like mad for that one perfect dress and give little thought to who actually made that dress and what they make per hour (30 cents in some countries). I'm curious to see how well this book does, and if it has any effect on the "bridal culture" we've created according to Mead.

I now feel slightly dirty and criminal having help to produce a wedding blog.