Smashing The Glass is all about super creative Jewish (and Jew-ish) weddings packed with individuality and personal details so you’ve definitely come to the right place for inspiration!
I’ve come up with lots of creative ideas for you with everything from innovative ways to include friends, family and little ones in your ceremony to making them feel ultra special at your reception
Ceremony ideas
A lovely way to get your closest friends and family involved is to have them contribute to your chuppah design. Ask guests to contribute different squares (tell them what size is required or supply a blank piece of square material sized correctly) and patchwork them together to make one big chuppah canopy.
Cheryl and Ernest’s beautiful personalised chuppah quilt (below) is an example that’s made out of the clothes of the bride’s mother who sadly passed away, and other momentous pieces including her grandmother’s wedding dress and a shirt her mum had kept of her grandfather’s after he had died, but the same quilt style could be used by asking friends and family to each contribute a square, and sewing them altogether.
Image: Daniel C. Photography from Cheryl & Ernest’s Jewish wedding
Or do what my husband and I did where we asked some of our guests to contribute to our chuppah design by asking them to compose a short message (in English or Hebrew) that we then incorporated into our chuppah canopy design.
This was also a lovely way of including guests from abroad that weren’t able to attend in person. We also chose four significant people to hold each of the four chuppah poles including Sharon, our Irish Catholic mutual friend that set us up (chuppah holders don’t have to be Jewish). Perhaps your fiancà©e’s best friend could do that? Everyone we asked felt very honoured!
Image: Earthy Photography from my own Jewish wedding
Another ‘ceremony’ idea is to replace the traditional Sheva Brachot (seven blessings) with prayers by all your friends personalised for you, then have each friend came up and read their own prayer. Chelm and Jake did that in their Jewish wedding — have a read of their wedding post for many more ideas of how to involve friends and family. And even if you don’t want to personalise the seven blessings, you can still ask seven different friends or cousins to read each blessing for you at the chuppah. People comfortable reading Hebrew can read the blessing in Hebrew, while non-Jewish friends can always read an English translation.
Wedding reception ideas
A lovely way to make your guests feel super special is to incorporate another detail that I did for my wedding. My husband and I knew we wouldn’t have a lot of time to talk to everyone on the day, so we spent some time before the wedding writing personal notes to everyone at the wedding which we then had printed underneath their names on their menus / name cards. It took a bit of time but we really wanted each and every guest to realise how much we wanted them there and what they meant to us.
. And I start with it, as it’s important to know that just like all other aspects of a Jewish wedding, the processional order will vary with how religious you are, and your local practices, but it will still follow this basic order:
