Most people think of Alaska as a cold place to be, but that’s really only during the winter. In the summer, most of Alaska is very temperate. As a matter of fact, Alaska has been named as one of the top 5 most romantic vacation destinations by numerous periodicals. When the snow goes away there are lush lands for visitors to enjoy including waterfalls and waterways, cruises and boat tours, and if you wanted to you could even visit a glacier during your honeymoon and be back in warm climes within hours. Add to that the fact that not only are days longer during the summer, but there are even a couple of places where the sun never sets during the day. That would be an interesting honeymoon, to be sure.

On an Alaskan honeymoon, the skies the limit. You can stay in a traditional hotel suite, a bed and breakfast, or go wild and stay in a cabin in the woods. You can go on a boat or get in the water, either swimming or kayaking. You can stay in the big city and live it up with the nightlife or go to a small village and tuck yourself away in a spa. You can take trips to Denali National Park or drive through Kenai Fjords National Park. By the way, did you know there’s a rain forest around Juneau?

And we did mention taking a cruise, so let’s expound on that. Alaskan cruises are very popular, and a 7-day cruise might be just what you need to start your marriage off right. The ports are much different than Caribbean cruises, stopping off at small villages and large cities that might include Vancouver, but definitely will include Anchorage and Fairbanks. You might even see a wild moose or caribou; hopefully you’ll only see a polar bear from afar.

Seriously, think about Alaska as a great honeymoon destination; you’ll be glad you did.

Let’s start with the wedding dress. Height has no determination on what kind of wedding dress a tall bride can wear. Overall, the same issues that plague every other bride plagues tall brides, those being weight and body shape. Since the taller a bride is the longer her look, she could probably easily wear princess style silhouettes and, for the most part, probably wouldn’t have to wear ball gown silhouettes, since they’re already long waisted. Of course, ball gown silhouettes also enhance breasts and hips, so a tall bride without many curves might like what it can offer.

Let’s next look at the shoes. Tall women love to wear high heels for fashion just like shorter women, but they always risk being much taller than the men they’re with. On a bride’s wedding day, if possible, it’s much nicer if the bride and groom can strike a balance without the bride wearing a heel so high that she’s towering over the groom to be. However, if the groom doesn’t have an inferiority complex over looking shorter than his bride, then the skies the limit, although wearing a 5″ heel might be a bit much.

Hair design is an interesting thing to think about with a tall bride. Having long, flowing hair is definitely an asset in this case, since tall brides can certainly pull it off. Although short hair styles can be cute, if a tall bride can have longer or fuller hair she could enhance the entire bridal look. Headpieces would look great on a tall bride as well, something to highlight the hair no matter the length.

Let’s talk about the bouquet. A tall bride holding a bouquet of short flowers just won’t look right, and she deserves better than that. Longer flowers, maybe lilies or even long stemmed roses with the thorns removed would be a great thing for a tall bride to hold onto during the ceremony.

Of course, all of these suggestions are based on the tall bride not trying to minimize how tall she is. We love maximizing everything a bride has to offer, including her height, and we’d rather a bride be proud and hold her head high. Go for the gusto!

For instance, these days more wedding parties are being set up where a member of the opposite sex is on the side of one or the other wedding couple. There’s nothing saying that the other person within the couple has to pick a member of the opposite sex to be their counterpart. It may mean that those two won’t be participating in the couples dance with each other when the entire bridal party goes out on the dance floor, but that’s okay. Those wedding party members can dance with someone else.

Something else couples can do is decide they want to face the congregation, rather than having the person marrying them doing it. This allows the people at the wedding to fully see the couple, their faces and expressions, and if the couples aren’t overly self conscious it’s a different way of sharing some of the traditional wedding processes with everyone else in a different way, such as exchanging rings.

In the past, it’s been an either/or situation when the couples getting married didn’t belong to the same religion. These days, it’s perfectly fine for a couple to have a religious leader from each of the religions present at the ceremony, and allowing each one to participate in the process. As long as the two religious leaders don’t mind, it’s all good. Of course you still have to work out where the wedding will take place, but most of the time grooms defer to the brides on that one.

Also, since not all religions expect the father of the bride to be the only one who can walk the bride up to the altar, nothing says you have to do it either. In the recent wedding video that went viral because of the dance performance of the wedding party, the bride actually danced up to the altar on her own, and had her father waiting for her. There’s nothing saying both parents couldn’t have been waiting for her, and there’s also nothing saying both parents couldn’t have gone up the aisle with her, or any other bride with her parents. And, in some religions, parents go up the aisle with the grooms as well, so why not think of that as something you could add to your wedding?

The basic principle of a wedding is to allow people to participate in the joining of the new couple as one. After that, the rules are yours to either follow, break, or modify. Heck, you can even roller blade at your wedding!

Offbeat Bride Wedding Templates

If you’re hoping to use an online source for letting people know what’s going on with your wedding, the two wisest choices to make are to either have a website or a blog of some sort. Each one offers something different and, depending on your skills or availability, are legitimate options for keeping everyone informed across the board.

Let’s talk about a website first. A website isn’t all that expensive, but there is a cost and technology factor that you might have to deal with. First you’d have to think of a domain name to use, which will probably be your names in some fashion. Then you have to buy the domain name, which can cost anywhere between $3 and $10, depending on what the extension is that you purchase (.com, .info, .us, etc). Next you have to decide where to host your site, which can run you anywhere from $2 to $50 a month; you won’t be purchasing the high end stuff for this purpose, though.

That’s it for the money; now it’s time for the technology. If you know HTML (website coding language), you can build a simple site that you can keep adding things to. You can decide on multiple pages or just one long page. Each one offers something different, but you might want to make it simple, which means one page. If you don’t know HTML, there are plenty of templates out there, some free, that you can use to create your site.

If that’s too much for you, both in price and scope, you can decide on a blog, and a free option at that. There are two sites where you can create free blogs that are most recommended. Those are Blogger and WordPress. Blogger is owned by Google and is the most popular, but WordPress allows you to create a blog that anyone can respond to without having to have a Blogger account. Both are easy to use, but the problem you might face is that, with every update, you end up creating new pages, and with every update your older information moves further and further away from your visitors.

This is where the ‘or’ comes in. Many people know about a service called Squidoo, which is kind of a mix of a website and a blog. It’s totally free, and what it allows you to do is keep adding updates and information, but keeps everything on the same page. That will make it easier for everyone to find the information you want them to find.

Of course there are also websites that will allow you to use one of their templates to create your own website or blog. Some will even design it for you if you’d prefer. A site called Offbeat Bride offers both.

Whatever choice you make, at least you have options for finding exactly what you want to do.

1. The weather. You never know what kind of weather you’re going to get when you have your wedding to begin with. Having to make optional plans for your wedding because of inclement weather can be a pain, especially if that inclement weather involves something dangerous like floods or a tornado. Also, summer days can be hotter or colder than normal. And let’s not forget about wind.

2. Bugs. Sure, indoors you get the occasional fly or mosquito, but with an outdoor wedding, that’s their domain, and you never know when something is going to buzz in your face or start eating you up all over. Did someone say ants?

3. Animals. Even worse, what happens when suddenly a pack of crows or geese decide that lovely space you’ve cleared away belongs to them? There’s also dogs that someone has let go of, squirrels, and whatever those fat fuzzy things are, though they tend to love to run a lot.

4. Traffic. Sometimes you end up being near either traffic, and whether it’s heavy or low traffic, you never know when someone’s going to hit the horn or go revving by. Bad muffler’s make a lot of noise as well, and who enjoys hearing squeaky brakes?

5. Trains and airplanes. I tend to have an affinity for both, but if you’re too close to either one of them the noise is going to drown things out at some point; you can guarantee it.

6. Distractions. The thing about being indoors is that the walls insulate everything and keep the focus on the couple. Being outdoors, there’s so many distractions that only the people in the front row are probably paying all that much attention to the couple getting married.

7. Level ground. If you’re going to be setting up tables, chairs and the like, sometimes the ground doesn’t fully cooperate by being flat enough to help you out. A little teetering might not be a big deal for chairs, but it’s definitely a big deal for tables, especially if things like the wedding cake and food are going to be on them.

8. Uninvited guests. Most people don’t have security set up, so you never know when an interloper is going to pop by to grab some free food and drink. At least they’re usually friendly.

9. Kids. It’s hard enough to contain kids at an indoor wedding, but outdoors, kids have already been hard coded to know they can scream at will, regardless of what else might be going on. If adults aren’t paying attention because of all the distractions, what makes you think kids will behave any better?

10. Getting dirty. Pretty much no matter what you do or how the weather behaves, at the end of the day people are going to be dirtier than they would have been indoors. Someone’s going to fall, whether you’re on the grass or walking on concrete. Someone’s going to drag through that one spot of mud, and it’s probably going to be the bride.

Q. Is there anything you can’t help a wedding couple with?

A. There’s nothing we can’t help with. In our boutique, for example, we even have wedding dresses that brides can either purchase or rent, and we can get our hands on pretty much anything a bride might want to wear. We have invitations and any other paper products that might be needed. We have arches and all types of decorations as well. We don’t have bridesmaids dresses or tuxedos, but we can put them on order for the wedding party.

Q. Can you handle two weddings on the same day?

A. Our boutique has enough people where, if there’s no wedding that’s going to be larger than normal, we can actually handle 3 weddings at once. We have people who have been trained to help out if we need extra hands and we trust every one of them. We’re lucky that we don’t have to make the food or drive the limos; all we have to do is supervise everything that goes on most of the time.

Q. Do you have favorites you like to work with in all areas?

A. We have multiple favorites, which works out well because there are so many weddings as certain times of the year that it’s hard to guarantee that you’d be able to work with specific people every week. We have a list of photographers, florists, reception halls, caterers… you name it we have them listed. We have a ratings system as well that helps us make sure we get the right person to an event. For instance, some photographers have teams of people that will help them cover a large wedding, so we would contact them as opposed to an individual photographer. Some caterers make everything in their homes, which works fine for many weddings, but a large wedding would need caterers that can put out a lot of food. Every once in awhile we get special food requests, so we also have a few gourmet and exotic food caterers on the list as well.

Q. Are there people you won’t handle?

A. I think the show Bridezilla highlights a lot of bad behavior that, in real life, a lot of wedding planners aren’t going to put up with. We have a behavior clause built into our contracts, and we collect a 50% deposit up front. If either member of the wedding party exhibits bad behavior, we address it early and give them the option of finding someone else and our keeping 25%, or being warned, as nicely as possible, that the next breach will result in our walking away and not refunding anything. We have rarely had to give any money back, and we’re also realistic enough to realize that on the wedding day a bride might be under a lot of stress, and therefore we tend to give a little leeway on that day. Outside of that, if the client can afford our fee, we’ll represent them.

Q. It must be something working with wedding couples of all types. What do you believe many of them expect in working with you?

A. Unfortunately, sometimes what they expect and what the reality is doesn’t match up. They sometimes want you to do everything from getting the church and the reception hall and ordering the bridesmaids dresses and getting the limos and all the other things that make up a wonderful wedding. We can do that part. What they also want is for all of that to come in under certain dollar amounts, and that’s when problems occur.

Q. Can you give us an example?

A. Depending on the area, it can cost anywhere between $20,000 and $50,000 to put a wedding together. We include our flat fee into the estimate so we’re not going to be under any restrictions that keep us from doing everything we can to make the wedding day perfect. Because we like charging a flat fee, sometimes couples believe that fee gets them everything they can think of. Although we have plenty of contacts, it still costs a lot of money to get everything you want. Unless a couple has unlimited resources, they’re just not going to get everything they want.

Q. What’s a typical wedding day like for you?

A. There’s no such thing as a typical day. It all depends on what a client decides they want. We can be a part of only the wedding or we can be a part of the entire day. At a recent wedding, one of us started the morning at 8AM with the bride while someone else was at the church by 10AM. The reception was held in a large field, so we had to set that up as well. We were also responsible for cleaning everything up; we didn’t get finished until around 2AM.

Q. That sounds like a long day. I assume that’s a day where you were responsible for everything across the board?

A. Yes, exactly. We booked everyone and everything except the location of the reception, as the family owned the land. We reached out to our entire network of specialists, which is something wedding planners are lucky to have. Of course, this was also one of those times when the family had enough money for us to get them everything they wanted, as they had over 300 guests coming. Everything was in place a month before the wedding, and lucky for us, nothing went wrong, including the weather.

There are many different types of wedding arches. You’ll find some that are pretty basic and others that have all sorts of decorations on them. Some are just the arch, while others can add touches of material, temporary walls and borders, and even be the entrance into things such as tents. An arch can be the perfect way to introduce a wedding couple, as well as the passage into being married.

Most of the time, people will rent arches, and if you’re going to do that you should probably let the people you rent from handle it. What they can do for you is make sure it’s set up wherever the wedding ceremony is taking place, then they’ll come back later on, pick it up once the ceremony is over, and cart it over to where the reception is so that they and the wedding party can come through when their names are announced. It not only bring a unique touch to the ceremony but helps all the amateur photographers, as well as the professionals, know where to focus their cameras. Of course, you can purchase your own arch, but think about what you would or wouldn’t do with it afterwards in determining if you want to go that route.

No matter what kind of arch you get, you can decorate them in many ways. For instance, you see the pattern on the arch in the picture here, very simple with bouquets of roses prominent in a few prominent areas. There’s also greenery interspersed throughout the rest of it. Any kind of flower would work with this type of arch. The people planning the wedding could also have draped all kinds of material, jewelry, jewels or other embellishments. You can also decide whether you want an outdoor arch or an indoor arch; many outdoor arches can be anchored into the ground for support.

And there’s nothing saying you can’t have more than one arch at a wedding. You can have both an entrance and exit point. You can have an arch over the gift table, or over the cake area, or around the food. You can have arches being white or any other color. They can be metal or wood or even plastic. Any type you decide to go with, know that it will bring something special to your ceremony.

In defense of the cake maker, though, who supposedly had a good reputation, she said that the wedding couple never confirmed that they wanted her to make the cake per the stipulations in the contract she’d given them. In her conviction, however, she had been given the deposit for the cake, which was half the price, and the judge ruled that should have counted as the confirmation, whether or not the couple remembered to contact her the week of the wedding or not.

In today’s world, there are people out there who are looking to get your money, no matter how they can get it. Some of these people are reputable people who, for whatever reason, seem to try to put couples through hoops that don’t make sense. Some others are outright scamming, saying they’ll do one thing then not following through. Kind of like roofing contractors who take your deposit, then don’t show up for four months because they’re working on other homes before yours, but didn’t tell you that at the time they took your money.

Just like in any other area, it always comes down to the motto “buyer beware.” Couples need to make sure that the people they’re working with are reputable and trustworthy. They also need to hold themselves accountable in some fashion to make sure they’re checking on what’s going on, since, in the end, it’s their wedding day.

The first thing couples need to do is have a list of all the outside people they’re planning on working with. Not necessarily the names, at least initially, but who they need: photographers, flowers, reception hall, music, food, etc.

Then, after talking to whomever they’re thinking about, checking their references or checking them out online. If they’re new, it could be dicey, but agree on a smaller deposit, since you’re taking a chance on them.

The week of the wedding, every person you’ve confirmed should be contacted one final time to verify the terms of the agreement, the times of either the wedding or the reception, or the appointments if the bride is either having hair or makeup done. If there’s anything that can be picked up beforehand, make sure that gets done.

If you need help, ask your bridesmaid or best man to help you out. Or, if all else fails, hire a wedding planner to handle all of that for you. Sometimes, that turns out to be good money spent.

No one should ever get scammed, but if people don’t protect themselves, we’re always going to hear more negative stories of how someone got ripped off.

They’re having what are known as “pet weddings.” In other words, they go through the process of marrying their pets to other pets in a full ceremony. It’s not for any mating purposes whatsoever; at least they say it’s not for that. What many people say is that they wanted to give their pets an experience they would never forget, and a wedding is one of those things they feel satisfies the requirement.

Don’t get me wrong; I love animals. But I’m a pragmatist at heart sometimes. I think there are things one doesn’t have to do because they just don’t make much sense. For instance, what’s the point in wrapping a gift for a one year old, or giving them a birthday card? They can’t read, won’t understand the message if someone reads it to them, probably will wonder who the heck you were if they grow up and see the card, and will have more fun playing with the paper than the gift.

The same goes for pets and weddings. Dogs and cats may be able to be trained in some fashion, but they don’t retain memories like this. They don’t remember that you told them not to drink out of the toilet the next day, so they certainly aren’t going to remember anything like this.

But that doesn’t stop some pet owners. They buy fancy wedding dresses to put on their female pets, and they buy tuxedos for their male pets, along with top hats. Some owners will spend upwards of $1,500 on a wedding dress for their dog; that’s just amazing. This happens mainly to dogs, since sometimes it’s hard to keep cats still long enough to get something on them.

They don’t stop there. They’ll pay a priest to do a full ceremony, obviously with some changes that animals won’t understand either way. They’ll hire musicians to play both the processional and recessional. Many times they have these types of weddings outside, which is probably smart, but a few have them inside a church.

People are allowed to spend their money however they wish, but there are some things that just seem, well, over the top. Now, if they can teach these pets how to say “I do,” that we’d like to see.