It may be summer (allegedly!) still, but if you’re planning a festive wedding with an alternative edge then you are going to love Caro and Sam’s celebration. Being non-binary, Caro in particular didn’t vibe with a lot of the traditional wedding messaging, so they opted to do things their own way. Caro wore a custom-made black dress from Lucy Can’t Dance, they hired a street food venue as their location and planned the day together.
“We wanted a casual and relaxed atmosphere that could make our personality and ‘weirdness’ shine”, Caro said. “GRUB was the perfect background for that, so we used the venue as inspiration for our decor and setup.”
“We wanted to have a Christmassy vibe, but we didn’t want Christmas to be the central and only theme. We chose one of the things we love the most, movies, to be the central theme, from the table names to references on our banners and during our ceremony.”
Another significant aspect of their wedding was a desire to work exclusively with local suppliers and independent vendors. Caro continued. “Everything, from the rings to the outfits to the food to the deco, was handmade by small independent artisans, mostly from Manchester and the North West. Working with a lot of young independent vendors, we avoided all the old-fashioned-sexist-gendered elements of the wedding industry and we are soooo happy about that.”
“We did most decorations ourselves except for the amazing banners by DayDreamers Creative Studio! The cake was also one of our favourite elements of the day. Since neither of us is a big fan of ‘classic’ cakes, we asked Kate from Drizzle City Bakes to create a tower of vegan cookie sandwiches for us and oh my it was delicious!” They also had a brass band playing covers of their favourite pop and rock songs.
The movie references continued into their ceremony for which they had made their own playlist of songs from their favourite films. Caro walked down the aisle to Lava, from the Pixar short, and they exited to The Throne Room from Star Wars: A New Hope. “We wrote the ceremony script and the vows ourselves to make sure everything was personalised and reflected us as a couple”, said Caro. “We are both pretty shy and don’t like to be at the centre of attention, so we tried to be as funny as possible to minimise anxiety and stage fright!”
Overall, they loved their wedding planning experience, especially because they got to do it together. Caro concluded, “There are lots of stereotypes about how the wedding planning process looks, and we found all of them to be completely untrue for us. We never argued, and it was so much fun to plan such a big event making sure that all our favourite things were featured during the day.”
