Planning a Disney-Themed Wedding:

The Date: August 5th, 2000.

The Place: The Reflecting Pond at the University of Central Florida.

The Mission: To meet my future wife in person for the very first time.

Outcome: Happily Married!

Well, there was more to it than that... namely our wedding roughly one year ago and the entire of planning that went into it before hand.

To begin with, we picked a date and our colors for the wedding. Our choices, ice blue and lavender, would set the color scheme for the rest of the items in the wedding.

We looked all over for a reception site location, as well as for a ceremony location. We looked at the Disney Weddings option of course, which would have been nice, but we decided to go somewhere else and use more funds for the wedding itself versus paying more for the venue site. In the end, we picked a very elegant meeting facility for both the ceremony and reception. In fact, the facility was cheaper and nicer than several hotels we looked at! Remember: always take a look at the total inclusive price (given in "per person" format) before dismissing a venue. Ours included all of the food and beverage service, and I'd be surprised if a hotel or commercial meeting facility allowed you to bring in your own food and beverage. Most of the time, you have to use their services.

Now that we knew when, where, and with what color scheme the wedding would have, we started to brainstorm about the wedding itself. We learned very quickly that by far, more effort would go into the reception than the ceremony. Of course that makes sense: there are more activities going on then and the guests will spend more time there then in ceremony area.

We knew we wanted a Disney theme, but we wanted to also incorporate some traditional themes as well. So, we decided that the reception would pretty much be all out Disney, whereas the ceremony would be more traditional (on the surface at least).

THE MUSIC
The key for the Disney part would be the music, and oh man did we have a killer music selection. In fact, that was pretty much all we did Disney as far as the ceremony goes.

The first song we did was the waiting music, or rather the "please be seated while the entire wedding party collects themselves from being nervous wrecks" music. For this we picked what is possibly the best song for this purpose: the Impressions de France Medley from the Official Walt Disney World Soundtrack. This song is over 10 minutes long, has beautiful changing segments of music and best of all, ends with a large pipe organ segment. This not only fit into our traditional wishes perfectly, but it made the place reverberate like an actual church, and was a three minute warning that the processional was about to start. To really feel the effect of it, I instructed our Disc Jockey to slowly crank up the volume during this last section to get everyone's attention that the ceremony was about to start. It was incredible!

For the rest of the wedding party, we took a less climatic version of "Some Day My Prince Will Come" from a CD called "Piano Disney," which I haven't been able to find online since we bought it. It was a very soft version of it, with a single piano playing.

The most important song of the ceremony was, by far, the song she would walk down the aisle to. She picked "When You Wish Upon a Star", and we used the version from a CD called "A Disney Spectacular." It is classic Disney music but just with orchestra, and this song got a lot of people crying before the ceremony even began. It was the perfect song choice, and even builds up to the point where she arrived at the altar.

In fact, I’m so impressed by that track and this CD, I really would like you to go over to Amazon.com and listen to the track right now. Then come back here and tell me you didn’t get a little teary-eyed!


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