Taming the control freak

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As my regular readers well know, I fluctuate between being totally enamoured with Germany’s relaxed nature of wedding planning and being totally head exploding frustrated. But the fact remains: our wedding is taking place here and all of our vendors have this same mentality.

This isn’t really a bad thing – it basically means:

• no contracts (that’s right people, the only contracts we have are with our photographer and our officiant)

• no down payments (only with the above mentioned two) (not even on our venue!!)

• a whole lot of “we’ll discuss that the day before” or “let us put something together for you”
For example, our dessert buffet is going to be a…surprise! Well, we did demand Kaiserschmarrn, but other than that, I trust our venue to put together a lovely spread.

Our prosecco toast is going to be another “surprise” – we will be having “prosecco, juices, various appetizers and TBD punches”.

Our band is being the most difficult to pin down – they told us we can discuss our dance options THE NIGHT BEFORE. This freaked me out, quite a bit, so I harassed them until they finally caved and suggested a few waltzes that they usually play. But they won’t give more. So our music: SURPRISE!!

I mean, this is actually all kind of nice, from a relaxed person’s standpoint. And from a price standpoint: we are paying flat fees for all of this, so as long as the variety is nice then we don’t have to agonize over spending an extra XX€ to have a particular juice selection, etc. But it is a bit stressful for someone who would like to have the whole thing a bit spelled out.

My solutions?

• focus on the things I can control, like DIYing my decorations, choosing our outfits, writing our ceremony music, making an awesome IPOD playlist for our prosecco toast and hiring our friend to be our DJ after 12:00am just to make sure that we get to hear our favourite songs.

• laugh about it – it’s Germany! They already thing I am nutso for wanting blue flowers on our cake and DIYing 75 chair covers – that’s ok! I think that we are lucky in that our German guests are not expecting “normal” because they know there will be a lot of America style touches going on, and the American guests are expecting a German-style wedding. So a bunch of guests with no solid expectations equals (hopefully!) happy (and intrigued) guests!

• enjoy the element of surprise – I guess it’s kind of nice that I don’t know EXACTLY what will happen on my wedding day. This is almost always the case in most German weddings, since often friends and family plan various elements of the wedding (games, guest book etc) to pop up as suprises along the way. I am embracing this lovely element of the day and taking lots of DEEP breaths.
Mostly, I am remembering that in the end, the day is about the DAY and not about all those details – it’s going to be a lot of fun :)