You Don't Need to Spend $35,000 to Have a Fun Wedding

Could it be? Some couples are now charging their wedding guests hundreds of dollars to attend the event.

And get a load of this: now guests are sometimes being asked to contribute funds for a down payment on the couple’s new home! How tacky is that?

It must be true; I read it in the New York Times.

Hassan Ahmed is charging his guests $450 for a ticket to his wedding next year in Houston. He has already spent more than $100,000 on the big event, including deposits on the venue, the D.J. (all this money and no band?) and the photographer.

Meanwhile, Nova and Reemo Styles, who were married last year in New York City, charged their guests $333 to attend. The couple spent “upward of $70,000” on their wedding.

The Times quoted a study by the wedding planning website the Knot: the average cost of a wedding ceremony and reception in 2023 was $35,000.

Last year nearly 20 percent of couples registered on the Knot asked their guests to contribute to a down payment on the bride and groom’s home.

The Times story, headlined “Want to Come to My Wedding? It’ll Cost You,” drew an irate letter from Lydia Fazio Theys, who lives in Woodbridge, CT., near my home in New Haven.

“Big, self-involved weddings really rub me the wrong way,” she wrote. “From telling you how to dress and what to do and demanding you travel to a place of the couple’s choice, to mandatory activities and custom videos, poems and songs, they are huge, often multiday displays of egotism. But charging for the privilege of attending one of these bloated and wasteful adult show-and-tell fests? That was never even on my radar.”

I’m with you, Lydia. As my wife Jennifer Kaylin and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary last week, we thought back on how much fun it was, how low-key, intimate and yes, inexpensive. We spent only a few thousand dollars. We didn’t charge admission, nor ask for down payments on our eventual first house.

True, 1984 was a long time ago. Inflation, inflation, inflation. But you can still have an intimate, casual wedding, and your guests can come for free.

We wanted to illustrate our eccentricities and our sense of humor, our love of whimsy. We wanted to entertain our family and friends, get them loose and laughing from the start. Our wedding invitation card was a still from “The Bride of Frankenstein.” We would get married while standing over the home plate from the baseball field where I grew up. (That was my idea; my bride, being a good sport, agreed to it.)

There would be no band, no bored musicians hanging around during their breaks. And no D.J., because you could never know for sure what songs he might play. My future wife and I and our best friend Ed Petraiuolo III spent weeks before the wedding making cassette tapes in his basement apartment. We threw the music of our lives onto those tapes, including the Beatles (“In My Life”), the Stones (“Start Me Up”), and fun tunes such as Steve Martin’s “King Tut,” Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen and Albert Morris’ immortal “Feelings.” Oh yeah, there was plenty of spirited drunken dancing into the night at our wedding!

Our venue was a place that has always been special for me and my family: a beachfront cottage we had rented for years at Buffalo Bay in Madison, a half-hour from New Haven. We rented it for the weekend; the rates are cheaper in mid-September! Our best friends and some family members slept there the entire weekend; my bride and I lit out for a local no-frills lodging on our wedding night. A honeymoon would come much later.

We decided early on to restrict the guest list to just 60 people. Our motto was “only our greatest hits.” My parents wanted us to invite some of their friends, but I said no; this was our party, not theirs.

We didn’t hire a photographer. There would be no stranger intruding on our day. We let my sister and a friend take a few photos. That was all we needed.

We did hire a caterer, Claire Criscuolo, owner of the beloved Claire’s Corner Copia in New Haven. She and her husband cooked up a fabulous chicken tetrazini. And of course we bought the booze. Lots of it.

The man doing the marrying was the minister of my family’s Presbyterian Church back home in Mount Kisco, N.Y., Jack Miller. I had known Jack for many years, and I trusted him. When we told him we didn’t want “God” to appear in his remarks and in the service, he was cool with that.

I must modestly say — and our friends and family will back me up on this, to this day — our wedding was a hoot. We walked down the stairs of that cottage with Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” playing, and people laughing, and I had my “Let’s Howl” tie on and we stood in front of the fire place that had a model of the Titanic on its mantel. Yep, home plate was at our feet; I drew laughter by pulling a whisk broom out of my pocket and dusting it off, just like an umpire.

We kept the ceremony and vows short and sweet, so we could get on to the celebration, the good times. After we performed The Big Kiss, Ed put on “When I’m 64” and everybody laughed and cheered.

Guess what? I’m 10 years past 64. My bride has made it nearly to 70. To quote one of the songs from our play list that day: “We’ve only just begun.”