Venue fibs and floral arrangements

I shoot quite a lot of winter weddings. Are you sure they will allow you to redecorate their tree? I'd assume they are just thinking you might bring in some extra decorations for the bits they have not done?

My advice is to leave it until their decorations are up, which hopefully will be well before your wedding. Once you have seen exactly what there is you can plan for anything you feel you need. You may find that you can borrow stuff from family too.

Might not be too late if you scour the internet to get some left over bargains for decorations.

If you were told that information is it in your contract?? Email?? I would be annoyed if they said one thing then changed it

They can be a bit of a mess to install but a dried hops garland looks great over a fireplace - we used to do this in the autumn when we had the house in Chichester - about 20-20£. You could dot it with flowers in your colours. I'm not sure what a venue would think of it though.

Yeah. I think we will have to move the flowers around so we can get the most out of them. We have two fire places, one in the ceremony room and one in the breakfast room. Luckily they are roughly the same size so we can just move them from one to the other. I think we'll do the same with the table arrangement - moving it from the ceremony table to the top table.

I like the sound of the hops garland but we're not going for a rustic theme.

Thanks for your help!

That's strange, Christmas time the venues always decorate everything, its not only for weddings but to show off the venue to other couples that are thinking of booking the venue, it makes it all Christmassy.

I too would be very surprised if the venue will allow you to strip their tree of decorations and re-do them with yours. The main reason why is health and safety/insurance I would imagine but also because the xmas decorations are not really something that people would expect to be co-ordinated with each couples' colour scheme at their weddings. As a guest, I personally wouldn't even notice as I would separate the two automatically i.e., those are the hotels decorations and these are the wedding decs. I've also done lots of xmas weddings and set up floral decorations for couples on the tables but I've never known a hotel/venue not have other decorations around the place apart from just the one tree as it would look a bit bleak otherwise for non-wedding guests.

I can see where you're coming from about them fibbing though so might be worth having a word with the Manager if you feel really strongly about it. It may be the case that the decs were silver and purple last year but they could just as easily be red and gold this year so I would definitely pay a visit in November and see what the colour actually is before you start spending.