Ahh Alice in Wonderland weddings, what’s not to love? A childhood favourite of so many of us, it’s unsurprising that we see so many weddings themed around it. Meeli and Wout’s Wonderland wedding might just be one of the best I’ve seen though. Everyone looks spectacular in their costumes, and they’ve put so much effort into the décor.
The bride explains, “We were mostly inspired by Lewis Carroll books, both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, I also loved looking at the other Wonderland-themed weddings featured on Rock n Roll Bride. Prior to the wedding we watched many different Alice films but when it came to designing our wedding, we were strictly true to the books.”
“One thing that we did very differently was the wedding ceremony”, she continued. “We had no officiant because, in our opinion, getting married is not about getting the approval of the state or god (we are not religious). It’s about making a promise to each other. So we wrote our own vows and read them out loud in front of our guests. As we had an international wedding, we did it in each other’s languages: I read my vows in Dutch and Wout read his in Estonian. We also had our guests bless the rings (every guest got to hold the rings and make a wish, but they had to say it out loud in front of everyone). The rings were handed to the guests by the best man wearing rabbit ears and the rings themselves were carried on the ears of a small bunny statue.”
“Another quirky thing we did was to give flowers to all our guests. Instead of throwing the bouquet to single women and making just one girl happy (actually I didn’t even have a bouquet!), we decided to make everyone happy. So it didn’t matter if the guests were married or single, young or old – everyone got a flower! The singer Silver Sepp played three of our favourite songs. During the last song we sang and danced along. There were also lots of bubbles because we gave each guest a bubble maker and they kept making bubbles throughout the entire ceremony!”
“Our wedding was very much centred on the guests”, she said. “We really thought a lot about how to get them involved with the theme and how to make this day fun for them. We had a dress code – they were asked to show up either as characters from the books or wearing colourful clothing with a pattern. Each guest got a role card from us. We used them to divide people into groups for the games. The cards were designed especially for us and we had the entire deck full of characters. To make it feel more real and to show a good example, our three bridesmaids all dressed up as Alice, the hosts were Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the groom was the Hatter and I was the White Queen.”
The couple named their tables after things in the books (they had a flamingo table, a three queen’s table, the king’s table, a white rabbit table, and a duchess table) but the madness didn’t stop there. After each course, the guests were told to move tables, just like at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party (move round, move round!) “Just like in the book, our guests also had to ‘move round’ because ‘things get used up’,” the bride laughed. “We did it twice, so each guest got to sit at 2-3 different tables during dinner. We used the role cards to make sure that the same people wouldn’t stay together. This was a great way to make our guests interact with people they didn’t know and a good method for bringing both our sides of the family!”
