Repeat after me: Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night will keep me from my appointed wedding.
Planning a wedding is one of the most stressful ventures you will ever survive. A million details must all seem to effortlessly fall into place. There has to be a point where one finally admits defeat and accepts anything fate can throw its way, right? After all, you can't control everything. It's not as if you can control the weather.
Not so fast.
You may not be able to control the weather on your wedding day just yet, but you can take a great number of precautions to ensure that your guests will not even notice that weather was ever a concern to you to begin with.
It's not enough to know in what climate and what time of year you will be getting married. Surprise storms pop up all the time. As a matter of fact, I've never heard of a predicable storm. Even if you are not planning an outdoor wedding, it's wise to ensure there will be a covered walkway and that your ushers have access to umbrellas. An outdoor summer wedding will require even further rain planning. Obviously, make sure there is enough tent space for all of your guests, food, gifts and sound equipment and that there are enough umbrellas to go around. One major common oversight is the walking space between key areas. If the wedding is held outdoors and a rain storm moves in, the ground will quickly turn into a mud slide. Rugs can save both twisted ankles and stained dresses. Keep in mind that if the storm takes a turn for the worse, you'll need a place for your guests to hide-out indoors until the clouds part.
But you'll never have to worry about such things — you're not having a summer wedding and besides, yours will be held indoors. Nothing to fear? Hardly. A freak snow storm in the middle of September can put more of a damper on your wedding day than a rain storm. Ensure that your reception hall or place of worship is equipped with snow shovels and that your trusty ushers (i.e. slaves of the day) know how to use them. A bag of coarse salt is an excellent cure for slippery sidewalks, but if you don't live in an area where that is common to come by, organic cat litter will do the trick wonderfully. It provides enough traction for walking on and cleans up well.
Quite simply, you can't plan for every wedding day weather eventuality. The day will turn out to be whatever it will — rain, snow, hail, sunshine, thunder and all. The trick is to make it look as though you knew what was going to happen all along and that you were ready for it. Then laugh off how little you were really in control years later.
