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Personal Narrative-Humorous Wedding

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Shortly after I got engaged in November 1995, a co-worker chuckled: "You'll have it easy. You're the groom. All you have to do is show up at your wedding with your hair combed."
Yeah--and my wallet open. People like my bride Karen and me (and most especially, people like our parents) kissed $35 billion good-bye at weddings last year. That's an average of about $16,000 per blessed event, including simple city hall ceremonies. It's amazing how quickly costs can get out of hand. Even before Karen and I had set a date, for example, I was in hock to my 401(k) retirement plan (I refuse to divulge by how much) to buy the ring. And within hours of the engagement announcement, our moms were combing our family trees in search of long-lost cousins to add to our 195-person …show more content…
We urged our guests to take home the centerpieces of peach roses in crystal vases, saving the $300 or so we otherwise would have spent on trinkets.

--The wheels. Here's where we got torched--mainly because of the unusually long five-hour lag between our noon wedding Mass (the only time the church was available) and our 6 p.m. reception. We paid a whopping $900 for the entire wedding party to tool around in two stretch limos for five hours, taking photos along the way, vs. the $450 we would have paid if the reception had begun right after the ceremony. We would have saved even more if we'd chosen a luxury car like a Cadillac DeVille (about $75 a day) over a limo (about $60 to $150 an hour for a minimum of three hours).

--The snaps. We spent just about the national average of $1,500 on still photography for the entire day, including albums for ourselves and our parents. To cut as much as 50% off that figure, consider having a photographer shoot only the ceremony and formal pictures at the wedding site. For photos of the reception, you could place baskets of disposable cameras (about $11 each) on the tables and let your guests click

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