Planning a Wedding? Don't Do This!

Your wedding is supposed to be the 'biggest day' of your life! Here's how to keep all those stresses at bay, whether you're new to all the planning or you're hours from your big day.

Your wedding is supposed to be the 'biggest day' of your life! Here's how to keep all those stresses at bay, whether you're new to all the planning or you're hours from your big day.

Whatever you do, don't get sloshed at the reception. I know it seems like a fantastic idea: let's go nuts on the free bar and dance the night away with wine in one hand and new hubby's pert backside in the other. However, this vision can go horribly wrong. I was at one wedding where the drunken bride was twirled like a Spinning Top and landed SMACK down on her face. The result was the loss of her two front teeth and she was carried out of the hall by the best man and groom with blood all down her front. Everyone just stared, mouths open like a school of codfish.

'What are we going to do about her dress?' a woman cried. I turned around to see the mother of the bride with her head in her hands.

What WILL her dentist say? I thought was a more pressing question.

Secondly, it's never a good idea to take your mother dress shopping with you. Or, if you do, make sure she's had a glass of wine. The first time I took my mum shopping with me to look at bridal dresses there were almost fisticuffs (or handbag wars) between my mum and the shop owner. The owner of the shop said that this one dress was 'made for me.' Actually, it wasn't, it had been made for someone else. And there was a problem. This dress would make a disco ball look bashful with the number of sequins and glitter attached to it. It wouldn't even be Lady Gaga's cup of tea. It was a dress I was never going to buy.

However, my mother panicked, 'Kathryn! That's something only a tart would wear. A nightclub tart!'

The owner's response was to wait until my mum had walked out of the fitting cubicle,

'this is your wedding, not your mother's!' the woman hissed. She was quite right, but it was definitely time to leave and at least my mother wasn't going to let me walk down the aisle looking like a glitter trollop.

Another important titbit of advice I would like to give is this...treat that special dress WITH CARE! There have been cases where the bride's cat has ripped it, the mother-in-law has trodden on it, and a dog has slept on it and left a carpet load of hairs on it. No bride is glamorous when they look like a Chewbacca wannabe.

But the most important thing to remember is that it's your day. It doesn't need buckets of money behind it to make it special. Just make sure that the headache the next day is from alcohol, and from laughing and joking, having the time of your life, and not from the excruciating pain of having no front teeth. That poor bride.

You can follow me and my blog Thoughts of a Curly-Haired Essex Bird on Facebook.

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