Although they got married on Halloween, Charlie and Chris decided they wanted their wedding to have a different feel to most themed Halloween weddings. With the groom’s father being from South America, a Day of the Dead theme made way more sense. “Chris’ dad is South American and he’s always loved day of the dead”, explained the bride.
“We both absolutely love autumn with all its vibrant copper tones and Halloween is our favourite holiday. We always celebrate it in a big way so it was an obvious choice for our wedding. We also wanted the whole thing to reflect my heritage too so the Asian influence throughout our venue, The Matara Centre, was really important.”
“Our Day of the Dead theme wasn’t just about it looking cool, it’s a significant festival to us because we felt our family past and present was with us on the day. The festival of the dead is when your ancestors can pass over to be with you and we had a table set out with pictures and gifts for family that are no longer with us.”
“Pretty much the whole wedding was one big DIY project”, she explained. “We had a LOT of pumpkins delivered from a local farm for the décor and we also grew munchkin pumpkins in our veggie patch that we glittered! One of our very good friends carved a special pumpkin for us with the date and sugar skulls that was used on the top table. The flowers on the tables were all put in carved out pumpkins that were painted black. They looked really great and people were able to take them home after.”
“I bought Peruvian fabrics that I hemmed and used as table cloths along with other day of the dead fabrics. We got cheap pots from a garden centre and spent ages painting different sugar skulls, demons and various Halloween themed faces on. We then used cacti and other plants in them on the tables.”
“I bought a huge amount of yarn from Poundland and handmade an insane amount of pompoms. It took months in the evenings in front of the TV! We had quite a lot of cheap Halloween decorations from various supermarkets and all over the place but especially on the TRICK OR TREAT table.”
“My advice to other couples would be to not be in too much of a rush to do everything”, she concluded. “Enjoy being engaged and actually planning your wedding. It’s so much fun if you don’t stress about it. I think there is so much pressure from people as soon as you get engaged. If you are planning way in advance you can sometimes get things much cheaper but we wary of falling into the trap of buying really random stuff you actually don’t need because by the time it gets to the date you have changed your mind or theme.”
