Wedding Seating Chart Trends
Wedding couples often struggle to create their reception seating chart. Many wedding surveys report that this is one of the most stressful wedding planning tasks, since so many people’s feelings and requests have to be taken into account, other people’s relationships factor into your big day (such as seating exes far apart,) and making sure that divorced parents are seated comfortably if one or both take a date to your wedding. The ‘family issues’ and diplomacy angle of creating a seating chart also joins up with the desire to make sure that groups of friends and family members can sit together and enjoy themselves more.
The question of ‘how do I make a wedding seating chart?’ gets solved much more easily due to the trend of planning your ballroom layout with different sizes of tables, such as some 14-seaters and some 8-seaters. There’s no rule saying that all of your guest tables have to be the same size, and in fact, it’s far more on-trend to have different sizes, shapes and even heights of guest tables at a wedding.
One of the wedding tables trends you’ve likely seen on top wedding blogs and on Pinterest is long tables, at which dozens of guests can sit…and a beautiful perk of having long tables at your wedding is that the style creates the opportunity for lush floral arrangements and candelabras extending down the length of the tables. It’s an elaborate and dramatic effect that you won’t be able to achieve in the same way with individual floral centerpieces on round tables.
Long tables and different sizes of tables let you group your guests more easily, which makes them far happier at your wedding than if friends who haven’t seen each other in years were seated far apart at different tables. Remember, weddings are reunions of those who live far apart and see each other very rarely, often not meeting each other’s kids for years. When you seat them together, their ‘reunion’ adds to the joy of your wedding day.
Some additional tips to help you plan your wedding seating chart:
- Allow your bridal party members to sit with their dates and spouses. It’s become a trend to skip the long table at which the bridal party members sit with you, and let them sit amongst the guests, while you sit at your sweetheart table.
- Skip the singles table. You may think that’s a great way for your single friends to meet each other, but many singles already feel self-conscious or stressed about being one of the only uncoupled guests, and it can make them more uncomfortable to be seated at a table for unpaired people.
- Skip the kids’ table. Have kids sit with their parents, so that the parents can supervise them and help them with their meals.
- Skip His Side and Her Side table arrangements. Even with guest tables arranged on either side of the dance floor, as your ballroom layout may be, open your options to seating all cousins from both sides near one another, all aunts and uncles from both sides near one another, all friends, etc. With this proximity, your new extended family blends better than if there’s a great divide between both sides of the family. This arrangement also helps you separate any guests who need some space between them.
- Plan multiple parent tables. There’s no rule saying you get just two parents’ tables. If any of your parents are separated, divorced, remarried, or bringing a date to the wedding, you can solve that tricky parents’ table dilemma by having three or four parents’ tables, with each parent getting his or her own table, at which grandparents and their close friends and relatives can sit with them. You get to design your wedding seating chart your way, easily solving those stressful condition that confound other wedding couples, ending up with a gorgeous ballroom design that makes your guests, and you, happy.
