Tip: Burning weddings and other festival nuptials.
Offbeat couples love to get married at events like Burning Man, the Oregon Country Fair, and the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival. I spoke to lots of folks who’d fallen in love at these amazing events and saw it as only fitting that they would get married in the same surreal, fantastical environment where they’d first met. Festivals are delicious venues for weddings—but be prepared for the fact that family and certain kinds of friends simply won’t be able to make the trek. Also, these large-scale events can be expensive as hell. Do you really want to make your beloved Aunt Mert, who lives off of social security checks, pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket to Burning Man? While I heartily encourage festival weddings, I also think festival couples should at least consider having a small, simple family reception in a more accessible location as well.
In our case, we tempered my mother’s homegrown forest eco-retreat with the relative comfort of her neighbor’s bed-and-breakfast. Our ceremony and dinner were held on the safety of a manicured lawn, with the reassurance of flushing toilets, well-tended gardens, and brick patios to soothe the frayed nerves of more traditional family members. It wasn’t until after dark that we led the troops down the hill to my mother’s property, where things were a little wilder, both figuratively and literally.
Was it a little funky? Yes. Did our guests poop into sawdust-filled buckets? Why, yes, they did. But did they have a great time? Sure looked like it. And we didn’t put ourselves in debt. Instead of paying to create a fantasy land, we picked the best things our everyday lives had to offer and crafted an extra-special everyday.
Our vision wasn’t really very creative in the “working from the ground up” sense: We did the things that were easiest for us and made arrangements with the people we were closest to. Instead of trying to forge a connection with strangers, we called on the skills of many friends and family members. In this way, we tried to create a day that was a reflection and celebration of our community of ravers, hippies, academics, and urban hipsters—not an expensive day dedicated to our relationship narcissism.
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