Southern Weddings

For our {Hello!Lucky Contest} we asked readers to tell us their vision of a “dream southern wedding“. The very lucky winner of this contest will receive 100 Letterpress Invitations from {Hello!Lucky}. (1 ink color with plain envelopes; reply set not included. Retail value of $600)  We’ve narrowed it down to 10 dream southern wedding inspirations, but we need some help.  Which southern wedding vision do YOU love most?  One vote per person. (We can tell if you vote for yourself more than once, so play fair.)  Simply leave a comment here with your winning number. Voting closes Thursday at midnight. Thank you to everyone who entered!  We had a hard time narrowing it down to even 10 finalists.

Here are the top 10 in no particular order:

My fiancé and I got engaged at the Pineapple Fountain in Charleston, SC. A perfect southern wedding for us would be held outside, on a family estate in Charleston, with the entire town invited. There would be local foods (nothing from more than a 100-mile radius), the drinks would be stiff, banjos would be played. It would be a weekend gathering of friends and family, warm weather, cool drinks and fantastic music.

A perfect dream southern wedding would feature a historic mansion set on the water. Waiters would pass mint juleps and sweet tea served in mason jars along with martini glasses filled with pulled pork and a dollop of coleslaw. Bridesmaids would wear pink dresses with green sashes, accompanied by men in blue blazers and khakis. A group of flower girls with wreaths and baskets would add extra fun to the celebration. Guests would dance the night away to a Motown band and end on a sweet note with a good humor truck!

My Southern Wedding would be at a beautiful estate strung with clear twinkling lights and full of fireflies. We’d drink mint juleps and iced tea from mason jars and take photos on the porch swing. We would gather all of our family together for a slow, relaxed weekend of socialization full of Southern comfort and hospitality.

Our wedding will be placed in Dallas, Texas at Marie-Gabrielle gardens. We’re Asian-American but we love to the beauty of the family-oriented and the all-get out nature of the Southern wedding. We’re going for a “Modern Vintage Garden Party” full of nature/lovebirds/butterflies with a little bit of bling. We’ll be getting married in a grove of trees under a chandelier surrounded by all of our close family and friends. Our colors with be robin’s egg blue, rose, and champagne. We love the lushness of pink peonies, garden roses, ranunculas and hydrangeas. We’ll have a cocktail hour with a Spanish classical guitarist where we’ll hang floral fabric for a photo center… b/c oh do we love pictures! The indoor/outdoor reception will have a combination of southern and Asian food. We’re going to have a beautiful cake with flowers and butterflies and the groom’s cake will be chocolate cupcakes. Our favors with a be tea/book of our favorite love poems. Our dance floor will be outside where we’ll be dance the night away.

My fiancé and I relocated from New York City to Nashville, Tennessee just over six months ago. When we became engaged in March, we immediately knew that we wanted to celebrate our wedding in this beautiful city so that we could share with all of our family and friends that southern charm that drew us here. When our guests arrive in Nashville for our June 2009 wedding, we will welcome them on Friday evening with a picnic of southern barbecue and outdoor yard games. Since my fiancé is a dedicated runner, the morning of our wedding we will be holding a one-mile walk/run around Nashville’s landmark Parthenon. Our afternoon ceremony—for us, the very heart of the weekend—will be at a beautiful, historic chapel, and immediately following the ceremony we will invite our guests to join us for fruit-flavored lemonade on the lush grounds surrounding the chapel. Our dream reception would be at a fabulous restaurant in a Civil War era home—front porch swing included—that overlooks the lights of downtown Nashville. The choices we have made for our wedding reflect our understanding of the perfect southern wedding: a wedding weekend that takes its time to unfold, that welcomes its guests with graciousness and hospitality, and that imbues each moment with the feelings of love, intimacy, and joy that a wedding celebrates.

Beautiful, antique lace dress. Pitchers of sweet tea and lemonade, spiked with springs of fresh mint. Julep cup-style vases overflowing with magnolia blossoms and peonies. Soft candlelight pouring from hurricane lanterns. Massive, ancient oak trees providing the backdrop, sun sinking into the ocean behind. Dapper groomsmen in simple black suits. Bridesmaids carrying soft white paper parasols. A ceremony path strewn with white gardenia petals. Gold Chivari chairs adorned with garlands of greenery, tied with ivory ribbon bows. Passed tapas-style Southern food – mini pulled-pork sandwiches, biscuits with country ham, single-size pecan pies. A barefoot bluegrass band. A Red Velvet groom’s cake. Dancing until the moonlight streams between the trees. A vintage getaway car.

My dream southern wedding involves family, friends and lots of kids. Sweet tea is a necessity and BBQ is required at some point during the wedding weekend. Fall is the perfect time for a southern wedding because it’s warm enough that all of your northern friends are jealous but your hair should stay under 3 feet across because the humidity has improved since August. You need at least one aunt or grandmother to be scandalized because you’re serving beer and wine. Someone at some point needs to tell the bride that she’s “as pretty as a picture”. A dream southern wedding needs at least one mother asking the newlyweds when they’re going to finally give her some grandchildren. After choosing the date that conflicts least with most of your guests favored football team, you still hear plenty of discussion that this year could be the year if only the coach was replaced. A southern wedding wouldn’t be complete without someone telling the groom they remember when he was knee high to a grasshopper. A dream southern wedding means wearing your Mom’s pearls and wrapping your MaMaw’s handkerchief wrapped around your bouquet. Most importantly, a dream southern wedding needs lots of love, tears, laughter and joy.

The magnolia and sweet tea visions that other people are writing about appeal to me—I remember my own time swinging on porch swings, eating tomatoes and figs from the side yard, “visiting” with my grandmother’s two spinster sisters who lived together in white linen and silver decorum until the
ir late nineties. But our southern wedding will informal and pretty. We’ll marry in a small, simple chapel and hold the reception in the Peacock Lawn at Ash Lawn. We’re talking about cutting dogwood branches and laying the tables under the old ash trees in the open air. There will be plenty of time for talking and storytelling, since that’s what my Southern family does best, and there will definitely be a dance floor set up beside the boxwood hedge. My early idea of a picnic reception in the Blue Ridge Mountains was roundly denounced by fiancé and family alike—no one but me wants to sit on the ground!—so we’ve settled on this formal setting made friendly and casual by picnic food and lawn games. There will be barbeque to honor my Memphis roots, and croquet to fancify ourselves enough to play in James Monroe’s side yard. Thank you for considering my entry! Your designs and papers are calm and beautiful.

Recipe for the perfect dream southern wedding: 1 beautiful Southern Belle (sister of alpha alpha alpha), 1 charming young gentlemen (brother of beta beta beta), 2 overly involved mothers, 1 laid back dad, 1 overprotective father not really happy about giving his daughters hand to the boy that reminds him of himself when he was young, Her brother and his girlfriend, His brother and sisters, 7 Brides Maids but, only one can hold the title of “Maid of Honor”, 7 Groomsmen… his dad will be the “Best Man”, 8 grandparents who wouldn’t miss this wedding for the world, 1 Flower girl with curly hair and the cutest dress you have ever seen, 1 Ring Bearer with a little pillow to carry the ring, A few great grandparents if you’re lucky, All her aunts, uncles, and cousins, All his aunts, uncles, and cousins, All her sorority sisters , All his fraternity brothers, All the friends from back home, 1 preacher, Chicken wings, ham, shrimp, mashed potato bar, green beans, fried okra, mac n cheese, corn, squash, the list goes on and on (all the bride and grooms favorites), An abundance of pink flowers, A DJ that could play any song requested, A dance floor for the 1st dance and the father daughter dance, 1 four tier white wedding cake, 1 chocolate groom’s cake shaped like a football (Roll Tide) with a side of homemade ice cream, The best photographer money can buy, 1 credit card with a very high limit, And most importunately… a whole lot of LOVE

My idea of the perfect Southern wedding is an event where guests feel transported to another time and place…truly, a “destination” wedding. We are having our wedding in Charleston, South Carolina, “where there’s a little bit of grace and charm left in the world” (Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind), next May. None of the close friends and family that we have invited reside in the South, and we can’t wait to show them all of the whimsical wonders of the city and surrounding environs. We are planning a leisurely weekend of activities, all designed for guests to relax, experience the hospitality of the city and soak up the historic setting. From a welcome reception featuring a Lowcountry boil on the lawn of a carriage house on the Battery, to the horse drawn carriages that will transport guests from the ceremony at the 18th century church through the city streets to the reception at dusk, and on to the shrimp and grits and biscuits with honey butter at the brunch the next day in a secret garden, we hope that our guests will feel the same sense of romantic wonder that we felt on our first trip to Charleston nearly six months ago. It was as if we’d stumbled on a secret city made just for us, and we hope our guests will feel the same way. The perfect Southern wedding will be timeless and classic, and most of all unfurl at a luxuriously slow pace.

Can I come to all of your weddings!? Thanks again to everyone who entered.  I am so inspired!  

–CONTEST NOW CLOSED, Thank you for your votes!–