Your best friend’s wedding

Your best friend’s wedding – how to organise the perfect surprise

Your best friend is getting married and you want to do everything you can to make it as special a day as possible. You’re planning surprises and little antics that you intend to throw in here and there throughout the day. But is that really what your friend wants? Your best friend and her partner have just been declared husband and wife, and you’ve never seen her so happy. They begin to walk slowly down the aisle of the church together. Suddenly, a man’s voice can be heard singing the opening notes of ‘All You Need Is Love‘. The bride and groom look up to see Lynden David Hall holding a microphone. Behind him, a choir strikes up. In the pews on either side of the couple, troubadours jump up and start playing. Your best friend laughs and looks at you with appreciation, realising that you’re the one behind this surprise, which is straight out of the film *Love Actually*. Everything is perfect.

One might well ask who wouldn’t get goosebumps from this scene in the film mentioned above. But are surprises really just as appreciated at a real-life wedding? It’s easy to believe that your own ideas are the best, and as a best friend you naturally want to play a part in making their day a memory to last a lifetime. For months, the bride and groom have been planning everything from the music and hairstyles to the food, drink, seating arrangements and napkin folds. A large sum of money has been spent on organising this celebration, and the worst thing that could happen is if something went wrong. How much would it actually be appreciated if, the day before the wedding, a friend dropped the bombshell that their surprise was a completely new table setting for the wedding reception?

When it comes to surprises during the wedding reception, the rule of thumb is that they should fit in with the rest of the planning. It’s best to discuss this first with the others involved in the planning. If the bride and groom share a particular interest, you can base the surprise on that. Avoid big stunts that the bride and groom have to take part in – that’s what the hen do and stag do are for. It might also be better to save ideas for fulfilling dreams that aren’t specifically related to the wedding for those occasions. Surprises that jeopardise things that have probably already been planned well in advance are usually not appreciated.

Personal speech

A classic and always appreciated surprise is to write a personal speech in which you can cover everything from funny memories to how much your friend means to you. Feel free to make the audience laugh with amusing anecdotes, but whatever you do, don’t embarrass either member of the bride and groom. No one enjoys being reminded of embarrassing drunken memories they’d rather forget, or how many beds your friend slept in before finding the right one. That said, there’s no rule stating that this has to be a humorous speech. Write from the heart and it’ll turn out best. A variation on this could be a personally written song. A personal and heartfelt speech or song from your best friend can be a thousand times more appreciated than any other kind of surprise. If you want to try your hand at other types of performance, your friend is sure to appreciate that too. Just remember that this is her day, not yours.

Appreciated surprises

Little surprises that add extra sparkle to the wedding day are hugely appreciated, perhaps not least when they come from a best friend. Decorate the newlyweds’ room for their wedding night. Scatter rose petals over the bed, light some romantic candles just before the couple arrive, and put a bottle of champagne in the fridge to chill.

Capture the wedding by taking photos of everything. Create a photo album with the best pictures and present it as a surprise afterwards. To make the album more personal, you could include short messages collected from selected guests during the wedding. Decorate the album with suitable stickers and so on. Another option is to film the whole wedding and then edit the footage and add suitable music. You could film the guests (including yourself) as they leave their personal messages directly for the camera.

The wedding present

If you want to give the bride and groom something more personal than one of the hundred toasters they’ll end up receiving anyway, a gift in the form of an experience can be very much appreciated. Skydiving, riding Icelandic horses, white-water rafting or a romantic spa weekend; the most important thing is that the experience is something both the bride and groom really want to do. Think about whether the couple have a special shared interest or perhaps a dream they’ve always wanted to fulfil. Otherwise, it’s really only your budget and imagination that set the limits.