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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Book bible of do’s and don’t of wedding plan

The Columbian
Published:

Want to cut your wedding-day liquor costs?

Need to rescind the invitation you sent to your unruly uncle?

Worried that the local pigeons will eat the remains of your joyous post-ceremony rice toss —and explode?

Linda Hampshire and Karima El-Hakkaoui are there for you. The bridal magazine veterans interviewed wedding professionals, doctors, celebrities and editors for their new book, “The Wedding A to Z, Everything You Need to Know … and Stuff You Never Thought to Ask” (Potter Style), which covers topics ranging from including animals at the ceremony to corralling unruly guests.

“Planning a wedding is stressful, but we want to remind people it’s also an adventure, and it’s fun,” says El-Hakkaoui. “It doesn’t have to be all charts and homework.”

Hampshire and El-Hakkaoui recently discussed modern day wedding do’s and don’ts. This is an edited transcript.

Your book includes a lot of tips. Do you have any favorites?

El-Hakkaoui: This made us so happy. We didn’t know if it was a myth (that) throwing rice as confetti will make pigeons explode. We tracked down Cornell Lab of Ornithology. We sent them an email, and they sent us back a very serious, well-written email saying it doesn’t make them explode.

Hampshire: For me, it was (what) so many experts said to us: Just treat your guests well. Really look after them. If you treat your guests well and they’re happy, the wedding will have all the emotion and love that you want.

Tell me about uninviting a guest. I didn’t know you could do that.

Hampshire: It’s a hard thing to do, especially if something has happened to your budget, or your venue, and you just have to cut numbers.

El-Hakkaoui: Linda, remember when we were doing the book and you were like, what if someone got arrested or got really drunk? One time someone knew the (guest was) going to bring a hooker, and the hooker liked lots of cocaine — so that’s when we’re like, yeah, you’ve got to un-invite that person.

How do you handle that?

Hampshire: You’ve just got to be really honest and just tell them, this is why I’m going to have to uninvite you. I think you should always just be direct and honest.

You point out that you can supply your own alcohol. Is that common?

El-Hakkaoui: A lot of people do it because it’s cheaper. A lot of people do it because it’s better than what the venue is going to offer.

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Hampshire: People don’t always know that they can do it. But the wine expert we interviewed for the book said always, always ask.

You see a lot of animals at weddings.

El-Hakkaoui: There was this one bride we know who insisted on having the dog be part of the ceremony, but she hadn’t really done her research. So she just carried it down the aisle with her, and then she dropped it, and the dog broke his ankle. They had to stop the wedding and go to the vet and get the ankle fixed.

That’s an extreme. (But) if you have a dog there, it’s like having a child. You have to completely and utterly think about the dog’s day: When is it going to eat? When is it going to have water? It’s a bit tricky. Tell her about the owl, Linda.

Hampshire: There was a couple in the U.K. that wanted to use an owl — it was supposed to be trained — to take their rings down the aisle. I think it was a barn owl, and it whizzed down the aisle, flew straight past the groom and up into the rafters and just sat there for hours. In the end, they had to get a ladder to go up and try to coax the owl down.

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