Wedding Reception Ideas

The key to pulling off a coordinated event: Evoke your theme throughout the affair. Whether that theme is as general as a season or a feeling, or as specific as a special flower, it should be the subtle thread that ties everything together. Your location, invitations, flowers, menu, cake, and favors should all cleverly reflect one common concept. Then, get as creative as you can!

Personalizing Your Reception:

When you're thinking about personalizing your reception, some obvious ideas should come to mind. One of the easiest ways to customize your celebration is to choose a certain flower or color that you love, then carry that idea all the way through your event.

Brides nationwide adopted a daisy theme for their weddings after an article was featured in Martha Stewart's Weddings magazine with the idea. Cakes were covered with daisies made from icing, centerpieces overflowed with daisies, and guests received chocolate daisies as favors. Needless to say, the season's weddings were awash in a sea of pale yellow and white as far as the eye could see.

If menu planning isn't second nature to you, don't worry. Any good caterer should be able to hear your ideas for a certain reception theme and offer a wide variety of menu ideas to help carry the theme through from hors d'oeuvres and appetizers to the main course and dessert.

Example 1

Say you love pansies and the color purple. If so, then go far beyond carrying pansies in your bouquet and dressing your bridesmaids in a royal hue.

Use violet- colored satin linens on your tables, and have your caterer sprinkle the salad greens with pansy petals (yes, they're edible) as well as freeze the petals inside the punch bowl ice cubes.

Have your florist tuck a pansy sprig inside each napkin band and put a vase of them in the ladies' room.

Finally, give violet seeds as favors, and see if you can find a poem about violets to attach to the seed packets.

Example 2

Another way to personalize your reception is to think about where you're heading for your honeymoon. One couple saved for more than a year to go on a cruise to the Greek Islands, and decided to turn their reception into a celebration of their upcoming trip.

Centerpieces were created from grapes and ivy spilling over from wineglasses and the all-white wedding cake was shaped like a Greek stadium complete with columns.

The menu featured everything from a Greek salad with feta cheese to spanakopita, lamb kabobs, and triangles of baklava next to the wedding cake.

Or instead of personalizing a reception around where you're going, why not theme it around where you've been? If you met your groom on the beach on vacation, why not have a beach-theme reception?

Sprinkle sand and seashells on each table and have your baker do a seashell-inspired wedding cake.

Have a calypso band playing in the background as your guests feast on lobster, shrimp, and fried plantains.

Example 3

One bride planned her reception around her career as a gemologist by basing each table on a different gem theme, such as sapphires, rubies, and emeralds.

The "ruby table" glowed with a red velvet tablecloth, deep red roses at the center, and a faux-ruby glued to each place card.

Similarly, the "sapphire table" was draped in a beautiful blue cloth with a blue delphinium centerpiece.

The menu helped carry the theme through with blueberries and raspberries in the salad, and chocolate- covered strawberries dusted with edible 24-karat gold powder.