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Author: Emily

The idea of an “unplugged wedding” is not new (it even made it into the New York Times this year!), but we wanted to take a few minutes to offer our own two cents, Southern style :) Perhaps the most interesting thing about this trend is that it’s paralleled by an equally strong trend of “hashtag weddings” — celebrations where couples are explicitly encouraging guests to hop online and share photos. Gracious — talk about a tech conundrum!

Y’all know that digital devices are everywhere in our daily lives, which means that contemplating the role you want them to play on your wedding day is almost unavoidable. There’s no one right or wrong path to take — you just have to find the one that resonates with you and your fiance! For our money, though, the best solution seems to be a ceremony where guests are encouraged to put down their devices, and a reception where they’re encouraged to pick them up — within reason.

A wedding ceremony is a brief and intimate moment shared between people who have been brought together as witnesses to the beginning of your marriage. What a beautiful idea! We truly believe that a meaningful ceremony can change lives — but probably not if guests are too busy clicking away to hear or see what’s happening. What bride wants to be greeted with a sea of LCD screens instead of smiling faces as she walks down the aisle? Not this one, I can tell you that — I wanted our guests to watch, laugh, clap, and dab away tears — and really listen and remember — instead of click and post.

Landon Jacob via Southern Weddings

So, how can you make this happen? There are a number of strategies:

1. Give guests notice of your intentions on your wedding website. A simple note can go a long way! Try: We are honored to have you all as witnesses to our vows and the beginning of our marriage. We invite you to be truly present at our ceremony, and respectfully request that all cameras and phones be turned off. We look forward to sharing our professional photos after the big day!
2. Include a note in your program. Something similar to the above wording should work beautifully.
3. Get your officiant in on the plan. Ask him or her to make a brief announcement at the beginning of the ceremony. For whatever reason, when the request comes from the officiant, guests will often be more likely to respect the couple’s wishes. If you’re getting married in a house of worship that doesn’t allow photos, you have even more backing on your side!
4. Consider a limited photo opportunity. At my uncle’s wedding, the officiant gave guests one chance after the processional to take as many photos as they wanted — even encouraging them to get up and stand in the aisle to do so. Then, he asked everyone to turn their phones off for the rest of the ceremony. I thought it was a nice compromise!

Anna K via Southern Weddings and Pure 7 Studios via Southern Weddings

While the same reasons for wanting guests to put down their phone hold true for receptions, many couples also love the idea of seeing their celebration from their guests’ perspective, and the additional sense of community that online interactions can create. If you’d like to encourage your guests to share your reception, we think social media hashtags are a great way to organize postings. You can post one on your wedding website to get guests excited before the big day, but make sure to post it at the reception, too. It might even be a good idea to mention it in your ceremony program to make your wishes clear for the different parts of the day: We are honored to have you all as witnesses to our vows and the beginning of our marriage. We invite you to be truly present at our ceremony, and respectfully request that all cameras and phones be turned off. Please feel free to share photos at our reception, however, using hashtag #carolineandben!

The South is famous for its hospitality, graciousness, and sense of community. When social media enhances these things — and it can — that’s a beautiful thing! Hopefully these tips will help y’all do just that.

Are you having an “unplugged wedding”? Will you have a hashtag for your wedding? We’d love to know!

emily Written with love by Emily
18 Comments
  1. avatar Anna reply

    We got married at the end of may and we didn’t have to worry about an unplugged wedding because my itty bitty town has no cell service. But it was fun to see the posts as they happened over the next days as people returned to civilization. We followed along on our phones while we were on our honeymoon road trip.

  2. avatar Lisa reply

    I am a HUGE fan of the unplugged ceremony, and will definitely be doing it when I get married someday! I’m not against encouraging people to share pictures during the reception, but I definitely think the ceremony is a time for people to put their technology away and focus the incredible moment happening for the bride and groom!

  3. avatar Laura Bitler reply

    Emily,
    As always, a wonderful post!! I wish I had read this BEFORE our wedding because I love your ceremony wording. We did the hashtag (which you graciously participated in) and it was so much fun for us to search for that # later. We were able to see the wedding through the eyes of our guests and see photos of details we didn’t notice or moments we missed. Since it’ll take a while to get the professional photographs, this was an easy way to chorale a variety of wedding photos that our guests captured.

  4. avatar Kaitlin reply

    Emily, I love your perspective on this!! We definitely want a ceremony where everyone is present, so I love your wording example to put in the programs! We will have a hashtag and encourage friends/family to share photos at the reception but the ceremony will stay more intimate :)

  5. avatar Emily Alice reply

    I love the idea of having the ceremony be completely unplugged, then with an Insta/Twitter hashtag for the preparation, reception, etc. Not only do cell phones distract for the ceremony attendants themselves, but no one wants professional photos with iPhones in the air!

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  7. avatar Caitlyn | The Aerialist Press reply

    Great idea! I’m an avid instagrammer but your I Do’s are a special moment.

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  9. avatar DimityC reply

    I am sooooo glad I found this. I will definitely be having an unplugged wedding, and now i know how to do that with tact. I am quite a private person, and the thought of seeing a see of mobile phones pointed at me as i walk down the isle… well…. it makes me very annoyed to say the least. The last thing i want is for my special day to be all over facebook with unflattering lighting, filters and angles…… eeeeewww. I want it to be remembered as gorgeous and perfect, which i will leave in the capable hands of my photographer.

  10. avatar David Roddy reply

    We wanted to have a traditional, and unplugged wedding. We used Photo Etiquette Cards for my event, and they worked great! There are always different forms of Wedding Etiquette!

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Y’all, can you believe that John and I have been married for almost a year?? Sometimes it seems like just a few minutes ago that we were sharing our wedding photos and film.

Tanja Lippert

We’ve been discussing for a few weeks how we’d like to celebrate our first married milestone, which got me thinking about the traditions that surround anniversary gifts. I did a little digging into the history behind the list, and thought you might be interested to hear what I found!

The practice of giving certain gifts for certain anniversaries seems to have originated in Medieval Germany, where friends [or the husband, depending on your source] were said to give a wife a wreath of silver after she had been married for 25 years, and a gold wreath after fifty years. Both materials represented harmony.

In 1922, Emily Post listed “eight anniversaries known to all” (1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th, 50th, and 75th) and associated gift materials in her Blue Book of Social Usage. In 1937, the American National Retail Jewelers Association published a more complete guide; they later updated it with a second set of “modern” choices. This is the list we still refer to today:

Of course, as cheesy as it sounds, the best anniversary gift I think you could ever get is another year with your spouse — marriage is a gift in itself, don’t you think? But it’s also absolutely a thing to be celebrated, and gifts are a lovely way to do that. While it’s handy to have suggestions to fall back on when you’re stumped for ideas, and it can be fun to try and think of a creative and meaningful gift within the bounds of each material, the traditional list is in the end just a list of suggestions. John and I love to travel and experience new things, so I’m sure there will be some years when we don’t exchange material gifts at all, but instead choose to take a trip together!

There is one thing I love about the traditional anniversary gift list, however: each material has a symbolic value, and the value increases every year to symbolize the increased investment each partner makes in the other. The idea that my marriage will grow more precious with time is a beautiful one, I think. Here’s to many, many more anniversaries ahead of us all!

Tell me: What anniversary are you celebrating? What did you get each other, if anything, for your first anniversary? Do you follow the traditional list of gift materials? I’d love to know!

P.S. Check back next week — I’ll be offering up some gift ideas for specific anniversary years!

emily Written with love by Emily
12 Comments
  1. avatar Ashleigh reply

    I love that the modern gift is included in the list, but I am a traditional gal at heart. I saw an ad for Love Book the other day and (while I’m approximately 49 weeks away from my first anniversary) I loved the idea. We like to travel, as well, and have already planned our 1-year anniversary getaway to a foreign land – so a small gift like Love Book might be appropriate versus a lavish gift on top of a trip! Great post, Emily!

    http://www.lovebookonline.com/

  2. avatar Elizabeth reply

    My husband I just celebrated our year anniversary. I got him a watercolor of our home. It’s beautiful and he loved it. I wrote a sweet message on the back. I guess that it’s traditional in that it’s paper. I like the fact that we will always have the painting of our first home together. He got me a necklace that is my monogram. Although not traditional, I love monograms and couldn’t have asked for something better!

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  7. avatar Morgan reply

    First off, can I just say how much I ADORE this blog?! I love you all!

    My husband, Derek, and I were married on June 2, 2012. We decided to celebrate our anniversary each year with the traditional gift! For our first year (paper!), he made me a frame and placed a picture of us from our anniversary dinner in Charleston inside it. I made a sheet that highlighted my favorite memories from our first year together as a married couple! I am looking forward to celebrating our second year soon (cotton!)…I am going to get us monogrammed robes from Pottery Barn, which is fitting since we’ll be moving into our brand new house!

    xoxo Morgan

  8. avatar Janice Collins reply

    For our first Anniversary I got my husband a “paper” gift certificate for a deep sea fishing trip off the coast of Charleston, SC (where we live). He was thrilled! He really enjoyed the day of deep sea fishing and even brought home plenty of fish for us to eat.

  9. avatar Cheri Dunn reply

    9/23/15- celebrating 9 years of wedded bliss today!
    We married on Bermuda in 2006 in a beautiful ceremony with many symbolic moments, the memories of which we will treasure forever!! We returned to Cambridge Beaches, Bermuda for our first anniversary and stayed in the same cottage as honeymoon. The resort manager gave us the key to the cottage! Our first anniversary gift was a beautiful watercolor painted by a local artist–on paper, of course!

  10. avatar Erica Broker reply

    My sister in law received a sketch of her wedding dress. It was the perfect one year anniversary gift framed.

  11. avatar Rebecca B. reply

    For our first anniversary my husband got me an anniversary sundial that he found online, it is made of glass and sits on the window sill and was handmade just for us so it would work where we live. It is a clock that tells time by using the sun, but the coolest thing is that it makes really vivid rainbows in our home when the sun shines. He had the guy who made it add a date line to our sundial that the time shadow follows on our anniversary day each year, and there is even a special mark on that anniversary line to celebrate the actual MOMENT we got married! My husband tells me that the sun and moon and planets all move every day, but they will always align for us on our day together (awww) It really is a great gift though because it also makes brilliant rainbows on the floor when the sun shines, and our toddler loves to play in the colors on the floor. I don’t remember what it’s called but you can find it online with a search – it has become a real touchstone in our home and it does something really cool every year on our anniversary!

Southern Weddings reserves the right to delete comments which contain profanity or personal attacks or seek to promote a business unrelated to the post.  And remember: a good attitude is like kudzu – it spreads.  We love hearing your kind thoughts!

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Armadillo cakes are nothing new around these parts (thanks, Steel Magnolias!), but I thought this little guy was just too cute not to share. And I’m glad I don’t know whether there’s red velvet cake on the inside :) Happy Friday, y’all!

Big thanks to Matthew Johnson Studios for sending this spiny friend our way! You can see more from Courtney + Kye’s Texas wedding on his blog.

emily Written with love by Emily
5 Comments
  1. avatar Lauren reply

    That is seriously SO cute!

  2. avatar Kye reply

    Red Velvet indeed!

  3. avatar Darlene Casey Rogers reply

    Thanks Courtney + Kye ~*~ Loved making your Groom’s Cake ~ Yes it is Red Velvet.
    Thanks Matt ~ the Wedding Pictures are Wonderful.
    Darlene Casey Rogers * Bride’s Table * Austin

  4. avatar Allie reply

    Hi, this cake was credited to the wrong person! Chef Darlene Casey Rogers at Bride’s Table made the cake!

  5. avatar Matthew Johnson reply

    Thanks for sharing this cool cake with Southern Wedding readers, I appreciate it!

Southern Weddings reserves the right to delete comments which contain profanity or personal attacks or seek to promote a business unrelated to the post.  And remember: a good attitude is like kudzu – it spreads.  We love hearing your kind thoughts!

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