Why Wedding Colors Aren't Such a Huge Help After All

It was during the holidays, most likely. At the glitzy restaurant, you got your diamond solitaire and the proposal you'd been waiting for, maybe for years (which wasn't, "hey, you wanna get two tickets to the Rangers this weekend?"). Then it was tears, a smattering of applause, crème brulée (hopefully), a frantic call to the parents and the top five BFFs, and then with any luck, you sat back for a good week or three to simply enjoy the moment, before diving head-first into what could be a solid year of wedding planning. You did, didn't you?

After that, it was binder time ... or event planning software time, depending on how addicted you are to your Blackberry. Now it was a simple matter of selecting a generous handful of vendors and checking off a few hundred boxes. But somewhere in all this, you and your fiancé needed to lead the troops, set the flow. Where do most people start? By choosing wedding colors.

The problem is, this is a lousy place to start. There's no question, wedding colors are valuable. Fundamental, even. You can't choose your invitations or even something as minuscule as a bouquet wrap without them. But these days, the average wedding is a very big event. And very big events need a center with far more emotional resonance than colors can offer. And that center is a theme.

Some brides balk at themes. They picture bridesmaids with fairy wings or magic wands, or towering piles of pumpkins and gourds stacked on hay bales. "Not for me," you hear. "My theme is 'a wedding.'"

But a wedding planner won't let you get away with that. And let's listen to her, because she
knows what she's doing. A wedding planner knows that every love story has a theme, including yours.

Let's make the theme-haters feel better by calling it by some other words. Let's try 'mood.' Or get wordy, and say 'a sense of place and time.'

Your wedding is a day-long dramatization of your story as a couple. Think of it as a movie ... goodness knows you'll be spending enough on photography and videography to justify that. So even if you plan to skip the hay bales, your event still needs to have a storyline, a look, a feel, a heart. And that heart depends on you two: your personalities, what brought you together, and your gut feelings about romance.

Arsty couples are basing their receptions on black-and-white movies (for some, a picture of ultimate glamour) or even a painting, like van Gogh's Starry Night. Starry Night evokes a definite mood. And within that mood are all the elements you need to plan an event: even one as big as a wedding. Moulin Rouge's love story is another mood, place and time.

The problem with pink and silver, say, or peach and chartreuse, is that there just isn't enough emotional vibration to move forward. Pink and silver doesn't say much about your hopes and dreams for your new life together, or how you met at the coffee shop, or cheered in the stands together as college sweethearts. It doesn't tell your guests much about you as a couple: how he left a rose on your car seat, or stayed up all night with your sick dog (now the happy ringbearer), or how you both independently came to the conclusion that you simply have to bike across France within the next ten years.

And that's what a reception is for ... to breathe that love story to life in some way that your guests will absorb, and remember.

So think about you two as individuals before you think about colors. The colors are secondary, if that. They're workhorses, and they'll serve you well, but settling on colors before you flesh out a theme is like distributing the trailer before you storyboard the movie. It leads to a lot of frustration and dead ends. And if you don't believe me, visit the color sections on my site where bride after bride is agonizing over what to do next, now that she's picked her colors. The colors give her no clue.

Spend your time on the theme, and let the colors play a supporting role. You'll find that a well-developed theme starts to almost plan the wedding for you. And then, when the day arrives, it tells your guests exactly who you are ... and how you love. And that's what a wedding's for.

This article was provided by Blake Kritzberg at FavorIdeas, a site for wedding favors, theme wedding ideas and sharing bridal finds.