Want to plan the perfect—and most original—shower for the bride-to-be? Or maybe you're having a co-ed shower for the future newlyweds! Either way, inside this must-have party guide, you'll discover fabulous ideas for everything from creating the perfect guest list and invitations to great party games, unique themes, and fun favors, as well as basic essentials for any kind of shower. You'll also learn how to incorporate elements of the bride's or couple's life to make the shower more personal. Your shower will be talked about for years to come when . . . -Guests dress like their favorite diva at the DIVA PARTY -The bride gets a newly decorated room during PICK A ROOM, ANY ROOM -Everyone enjoys a day of pampering at the LAP OF LUXURY shower -Guys and gals experience "Bourbon Street" at the MARDI GRAS shower -And so much more!

A companion to the popular website APracticalWedding.com and A Practical Wedding Planner, A Practical Wedding helps you sort through the basics to create the wedding you want -- without going broke or crazy in the process. After all, what really matters on your wedding day is not so much how it looked as how it felt. In this refreshing guide, expert Meg Keene shares her secrets to planning a beautiful celebration that reflects your taste and your relationship. You'll discover: The real purpose of engagement (hint: it's not just about the planning) How to pinpoint what matters most to you and your partner DIY-ing your wedding: brilliant or crazy? How to communicate decisions to your family Why that color-coded spreadsheet is actually worth it Wedding Zen can be yours. Meg walks you through everything from choosing a venue to writing vows, complete with stories and advice from women who have been in the trenches: the Team Practical brides. So here's to the joyful wedding, the sensible wedding, the unbelievably fun wedding! A Practical Wedding is your complete guide to getting married with grace.

A memory book for keeping bridal shower celebration memories, guests, gifts, photos, words of wisdom for the bride, shower activities and much more...

Contemporary weddings in the United States can be extravagant, highly ritualized, and costly affairs. From the intricate details of the wedding dress, to the painstaking selection of flowers, to the festively-packaged favors offered to guests, they are often the culmination of months of fastidious planning and preparations. In Something Old, Something Bold, sociologist Beth Montemurro takes a fresh look at the wedding process, offering a perspective not likely to be found in the slew of planning books and magazines readily available to the modern bride. Focusing on two events - bachelorette parties and bridal showers - Montemurro draws upon years of ethnographic research and interviews to explore what these prenuptial events mean to women participants and what they tell us about the complexity and ambiguity of gender roles. The innovation of the bachelorette party - a celebration of the bride-to-be's premarital sexual identity - and the addition of men to the domestically oriented shower have often been thought to indicate gender convergence and a more progressive attitude toward power relations between men and women. But, Montemurro suggests that this is not always the case. her friends and family, who present elaborate and exaggerated scenarios that demonstrate both what she is sacrificing and what she is gaining. Ultimately, Montemurro argues, prenuptial rituals contribute to the stabilization of gender inequalities - that American society at the turn of the twenty-first century is still very much married to tradition and traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity.

Presents advice on weddings discussing the responsibilities and obligations of friends and family, and covering subjects such as the engagement, shower, gifts, and the reception.

Bride and mother-of-the-bride rebel against today’s monster weddings and explain how weddings can be charming, affordable—and excruciatingly correct. Today’s brides are bombarded with wedding advice that promises perfection but urges achieving it through selfishness (“It’s your wedding, and you can do whatever you like”), greed (choosing the presents that guests are directed to buy), and showing off (“This is your chance to show everyone what you’re about”). Couples wishing to resist such pressure see elopement or a slapdash wedding as the only alternatives to a gaudy blowout. But none of these choices appealed to a bride who happened to have been brought up by Miss Manners. Judith Martin and her newlywed daughter, Jacobina, explain how to have a dignified ceremony and delightful celebration without succumbing to the now-prevalent pattern of the vulgar, money-draining wedding that exhausts families and exploits friends.

Get the delightfully straightforward secrets for planning a shower, dozens of creative ideas for decorating, a plethora of recipes, and endlessly helpful advice to throw memorable and personalized showers with this new book that guides even the first-time hostess through the intricate shower-throwing process.