To table plan or not to table plan that is the question
This is a transcript of a video from The Wedding Planning Hub
This is something that makes me mad sometimes. It will be the biggest stress of your wedding more than likely. Here are some of my tips as to how to do it right.
Basically what you need to do is you need to think about where you want to put your parents first and the reason why I sort of hesitate while I say that is there’s no right or wrong way to do it. But I will tell you what happened with my wedding and then you can decide from there how you think it would work with your wedding.
My parents are separated and my husband’s parents are separated and for me, I looked at the traditional top table and I was like ‘oh I want to have a traditional top table and this is going to be amazing’.
The way that you do the traditional top table is you have the couple seated in the middle. Next to the bride you would have the bride’s father and on the other side of the bride’s father, you would have the groom’s mother. And then next to the groom you would have the bride’s mother and then next to her you would have the groom’s father. And then on either side, you would have the maid of honour and the best man.
And that is traditionally how you would do a seating.
Now obviously when you then add step-parents into that, that can get a little bit more complicated especially since my stepmother has been my stepmother since I was nine years old so she’s very much part of our family. So we had my stepmother on our top table instead of my maid of honour and I had my maid of honour sitting with her husband on another table.
And that kind of, for us, made our top table and it was great up until the point that we then got up to go and chit chat to lots of people and I think my mom ended up feeling a little bit isolated because she was on the top table, and although our parents have both met each other they’re not particularly the closest, you know they haven’t spent loads of time together. They can do small talk it’s fine but my mum could see that her brother and all of his family were sitting on a table in front of her and I’d made a really silly mistake where I’d said to my mum, please stay seated and she took it literally and literally sat at the top table for the entire time because she thought that’s what she was supposed to do.
Now in hindsight, I probably would have had a Cupid Table. A Cupid Table is a table for just the couple or for just the couple and the best man and the maid of honour then if you do get up and spend most of the meal walking around chatting to your guests you’re not leaving anybody really isolated on the top table. Don’t get me wrong, no one had a bad time. I just think that in hindsight that would have been a smoother way to do it.
The other option that you could have is to have the top table as a big round table.
If you are having a round top table then just make sure that anyone that gets up to do the speeches actually goes and stands next to the couple so the photographer and the videographer are able to capture everybody’s expressions as well. And also capture the people in the room at the same time because there’s nothing worse than having the couple with their backs facing the rest of the room and then someone stands up to go and do the speech to face the room and everything’s in the wrong place. Photographically that’s really challenging and you really do want to have good pictures of the speeches because they can be really really funny once you’ve got your top table sorted out.
The next challenging thing is to get all the other tables done and I think the best way to do that is with some lego and just make a big table plan on the floor, name everybody with cute lego pieces or get something like paper tabs or whatever – post-it notes are great – and actually put the names around the tables so you have it visually and you can really see.
I think it’s great to do tables of eight to ten and sometimes a table of six can work if needs be but there’s always going to be one table that doesn’t fit that well so just try to organize it so that you really do get the best people with the people you think they will get on with the most.
But again there’s no right way or wrong. Just have a play with it and see what works for you.
Guest post from Sam
@The Wedding Planning Hub
