Make your wedding memorable with mood-enhancing decorations.   Since the ceremony decorations are only supposed to cost 1.5% of your total budget, you’ll either have to be meager, or do without. Usually it is easy to do without decorations at the ceremony site. This is often the case if you are getting married in a historic church or a garden. If you do decide to have decorations, here are some tips.

The most common ceremony decoration is bows. You can buy, or make, large ribbon bows to put on the ends of the pews. This gives the room a more festive look, plus you can either do all white bows or incorporate your wedding colors into the ceremony. You can also choose to drape ribbons or tulle (a type of netting ribbon) along the back of the pews as well. Ribbons can also be used around windows, doors, etc. These decorations are great because you can often find very inexpensive ribbon if you buy it in bulk.

The second decoration idea is candles. Candles are always associated with romance, so they create a wonderful atmosphere that can’t be beat. Some couples choose to do a “candlelight” ceremony, where the only light comes from candles or small lights (like Christmas lights). This can become very expensive, especially if you have a large building that needs a lot of lighting. However, usually you can find candles very cheap- you can even get boxes of pillar candles at a dollar store.

The final idea is flowers, which is by far the most expensive decoration, but also the most beautiful. You could have little baskets filled with flowers at the ends of the pews. You could have large topiaries of flowers all around the room. You could line the floors with flower petal. There are so many options. If you are on a tight budget, you may still be able to use flowers, just by getting flowers that are in season, or go to a flower market or wholesale flower shop.

Most couples get married in churches, which are really good locations for minimal decorations. Often, couples will choose a holiday season to get married in so that they can take advantage of the decorations that the church puts up. However, this can be troublesome in some cases. For example, if you are getting married in November with a “fall” theme, you may have a problem if the church puts up its Christmas decorations early.

Don’t forget that this is your big day and everything should be perfect. If you always dreamed of a ceremony with hundreds of roses surrounding you- go for it and allocate the money from something in the budget that you won’t need as much for. No matter what, you should stay true to yourself and do whatever would make you have the best day of you life.