Planning Your Perfect Wedding – A Hike in the Woods Might Be Your Perfect Wedding

If you love the outdoors, it makes sense to make it a part of your wedding. There’s so much emphasis on having a big, formal wedding. What if you’re not formal people? What if that is completely wrong for you? What if, when you say the word cathedral, you conjure up a grove of tall trees with sunlight filtering in? You might be a candidate for getting married in what is sacred space for you.

If this limits the number of people you can have with you, you may want to hike from someplace to a place where you can have more people. Or you just may want to have a small wedding with only a few intimate friends. The magic of the place you choose will depend upon what kind of site and what kind of accessibility you want to offer your guests.

You can make your hike an all out hike, or you can make it more of a stroll or even a wedding procession. What about hiking into a place from different directions, leading your communities to a gathering place? There’s great precedent for this. This is certainly how Viking weddings were conducted. People walked to a neutral place to marry.

Good hikers can hike in interesting clothes. I’ve had a bride wander up a mountain path in an ankle length white dress and low heels with her pup straining at his leash. She was a very regular hiker and completely at home in the woods. So while her dress wasn’t wildly formal, it was clearly bridal! Or you can do something a lot more relaxed. You’re probably better with a stroll, because you want to feel as well as look wonderful when you marry!

You can picnic in the woods. If there’s easy access, have your picnic catered. You could hike it in. Or you could get married, hike back to civilization and have your wedding reception whenever and wherever you wanted it! That’s the fun of this. You get to do what you want.

But if the middle of the woods is what speaks to your souls, you should be in the middle of the woods as you exchange your wedding vows. Your community should be leaning against trees or seated on rocks and clustered around you for your wedding ceremony. (Your celebrant should be strong enough to make it to the wedding, as well!)

A walk in the woods is a wonderful metaphor for marriage. Understanding that the journey you take in one another’s company is a sacred one, through territory that is beloved even when it’s challenging, is a metaphor that will encourage you throughout your marriage. You will never walk through a wood, in particular, you will never walk through THAT wood, without thinking of how much you love one another. Every marriage can use that sort of encouragement! And every marriage should have a wedding ceremony and wedding vows that are perfectly designed to move the couple into healthy, happy, lifelong relationship. For you, that may just start out with a hike in the woods.