Intimate Weddings: Planning a Small Wedding
that Fits your Budget & Style
by Christina Friedrichsen
Published by North Light Books; 192 pages, $22.99

IF YOUR IDEA OF THE PERFECT WEDDING DOESN’T INVOLVE A FEW HUNDRED GUESTS, the good news is you’re not alone. Author Christina Friedrichsen wanted an intimate, highly personalized wedding ceremony and reception, and was inspired to write Intimate Weddings when she noted the dearth of literature and information about planning a small-scale affair. “The majority of wedding-related books were devoted to large-scale affairs, and even the Internet sites seemed to cater to couples planning big weddings,” she writes.

Friedrichsen discusses budget, guest list, reception, theme and other related subjects, offering insight to some of the advantages of and possibilities for small weddings. She punctuates her book with lists of ideas and questions pertinent to each chapter, and in the process challenges readers to consider their limits and preferences. In addition, she provides brief vignettes of couples’ intimate weddings, complete with the story of how they met, how they planned their weddings and spent their budget. Many also provide hints on how to save money.

Intimate Weddings is a light, easy and carefully researched book, and a useful resource for planning a smaller wedding. Friedrichsen’s list of resources at the end of her book provides a great springboard for couples interested in accessing more information.

Plan Your Wedding...In No Time
By Leah Ingram
Published by Que Publishing; 247 pages, $23.95

MANY COUPLES ARE OVERWHELMED BY THE ARRAY OF CHOICES INVOLVED IN PLANNING their wedding. Plan Your Wedding is useful in its instructive, authoritative, almost bossy voice. If you’re having trouble making decisions and want a traditional tone for your wedding, this book provides an easy-to-follow format, with to-do lists, an inventory of things you’ll need and a selection of notes, tips and cautions, many with reference to web sites where you can find more information.

Plan Your Wedding makes extensive use of lists, rendering it an extremely useful tool to have nearby as you explore your options. There are lists for planning your gift registry (with columns titled ‘what we have,’ ‘what we want,’ and ‘what we don’t need’), and a gown-shopping organizer so you can keep track of what your bridal party is wearing. A guest list database is a useful addition as is the Tasks To Do In Relative Order list, with its time budget columns—one column with time budgets “in a perfect world,” and the other “in a crunch.” Offering a dash of humour and a heavy dose of reality, Plan Your Wedding helps couples do just that.