The Debrett's Wedding Guide: From Traditional Rituals to Contemporary Choices

This comprehensive Wedding Guide is a completely updated, revised and expanded version of Debrett's Wedding Handbook, which covers everything from choosing a ceremony and venue to budgeting, refining a guest list, sending out invitations, styling the day and planning the reception. The Guide recognises that society has changed, manners have become less formal, and weddings and civil partnerships have evolved to reflect different social attitudes. Marrying couples can now pick and choose the elements of the traditional wedding ritual which they want to retain, enhance or discard, and may even choose to totally re-conceptualise the wedding ceremony. With this in mind the Guide looks at the traditional trappings of the wedding, from ceremonies and invitations to choosing a wedding team, the wedding dress, reception planning, speeches and honeymoons. It also examines the many variations of this formula that are now possible: civil partnerships, same-sex weddings, humanist celebrants, outdoors weddings, destination weddings. In addition, it examines the perennial social dilemmas that face many couples who are planning a wedding: re-marriages, former partners, estranged families, children, plus ones. It offers unfailingly sensible advice when it comes to navigating these social difficulties and ensuring that couples optimise their big day and cause the minimum of offence or social embarrassment.