Planning Your Beach Themed Wedding

A wedding on the beach is a truly romantic way to begin your life together. Whether you plan a formal affair, or want a casual, relaxed atmosphere, there are a wealth of ideas that you can draw from when planning the event. A beach wedding is a perfect reason to have a destination wedding in an exotic locale, too.

To begin with, we can talk about attire for you and the wedding party. If you choose to wear formal wedding clothes it might be a good idea to forget the shoes or get some fancy jewelled sandals, as walking on the sand in high heels would be quite difficult. Sandals, flip flops, or even bare feet might be a better alternative. You may choose to wear a colourful sundress, or even a bathing suit with a sarong for a more casual ceremony. To dress up the bathing suit and sarong idea or to make it more elegant in the traditional white you can use a large lacy white shawl tied around the waist with a simple white, one-piece bathing suit.

You may decide to exchange vows under a gazebo decorated with exotic flowers. Use colourful wild flowers, or orchids, if the setting is formal. Drape the gazebo with netting for a more romantic effect.

You may want to have beach themed favours for your guests to take away with them. Tiny sand pails with candies, or even a candle in the shape of a shell are good ideas. The sand pails, which come in many colours, also make great holders for the flowers at each table, or use them for the centrepiece on the main table. Group them together and fill with exotic flowers. A hurricane vase looks quite beautiful when filled halfway with coloured sand and a large candle in the centre. Add shells or coloured sea glass around the candle.

Your cake could be decorated with sand dollars, sea life, and starfish, all edible, of course! Or you could have colourful flowers scattered randomly on the cake, with more flowers around the bottom. Brown sugar will give the impression of sand at the base of the cake. You can place small shells or starfish on the sugar to further the beach theme idea. Use other beach themed decorations such as starfish, netting, sand dollars, sea shells, floating candles in coloured water, and the like.

To highlight the festivities you may want to have a tropical band play music at your reception, and for a real bang, you could hire Polynesian dancers to entertain while the guests are enjoying a meal consisting of various seafood dishes. You might even choose to have a wet bar with an assortment of seafood titbits to nibble on.

For the grand finale, have some fireworks on the beach before you leave the festivities by boat to cap off the beach themed wedding day!