How to Pick a Wedding Date

In honor of the fact that we will be saying "I DO!" exactly seven months from today, I wanted to write about our wedding date, August 28, 2010, and why we picked that particular date.

I think, for most people, the most important factors are (i) which season you want to get married in, (ii) how much time you want to spend planning your wedding, and, for couples with a specific venue in mind, (iii) which dates the venue is available.

When we decided to get married in Billings, we quickly decided that we wanted it to be during the summer so that we could marry outside. We did not want to get married in 2009 because we would only have had 7-9 months to plan and our family already had a lot going on in 2009, with baby Stella arriving in January and Alex graduating in May. Also, I knew that I wanted at least one year to plan it. We definitely could have done it in less time, but why would we want to? There is so much work that goes into planning a wedding, and I wanted it to be a fun experience, not stressful. And having a longer engagement allowed us more time to save up for it. And, as it turned out, I was crazy busy at work all during the summer of 2009, so it would have been really difficult to fit in our wedding, let alone plan it.

So we were looking at Summer 2010. We got lucky as far as venues go, since mom and Jerry didn't have any other bookings for that summer :) We started looking toward the end of the summer so that we would have more reliable weather (June in Montana is still very temperamental, weather-wise), and so that we'd have the whole summer to get the yard and the barn ready. It made sense to keep the date close to September 1, when I would be getting more vacation time, so that I would be able to take of enough vacation time for our wedding and honeymoon. But we didn't want it to be over Labor Day weekend because so many people do other things that weekend and I did not want them to have to choose between their other plans and our wedding. Oh, and we wanted it on a Saturday.

Steve threw out the date August 28, 2010, and it just really stuck. Also, it just so happened that my mom was first married on August 28 back in 1976 and Steve's parents were married on the 28th of December in 1969. So, in addition to being highly logical, the 28th of August made sense for sentimental reasons, too.

There you go--the explanation behind our wedding date! How did you pick your wedding date?