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Today’s post is written by Kacey Bradley and will teach you helpful tips for planning your wedding seating chart. Read below for the lovely pieces of incite that she has to share!
The wedding dress is hanging in your closet. You’ve settled on your color scheme and ordered the flowers. You picked the perfect caterer to keep guests well-fed. You already have most of your wedding day figured out, but there’s one thing left to do — usually the most dreaded task — and that’s to come up with a seating chart for the reception.
It’s almost impossible to design a seating arrangement that makes everyone happy, while considering the number of people per table and setup of the room. No matter how hard you try, someone will always have something to say about the way you seated them. But that doesn’t mean you should agonize over this very small part of the wedding day. Here are five tips to follow that will make your seating-chart woes all but disappear.
1. Keep Family Together
Start your seating chart by figuring out where the most important people in your life will sit: your family, particularly your parents. Tradition offers two main options here: Have parents sit with their new in-laws, or have each set head up a separate table with their closest family and friends. Start here, then work on seating aunts, uncles, cousins and other family members. 
2. Only Mix and Match as Necessary
In theory, it could be fun to turn your wedding into a round of blind dating for some of your single friends and seat them all at one table — even if they’re total strangers. But remember, everyone is here to see you get married, not necessarily to mingle. So, don’t force it on them. Seat friends and family with people they know — unless it’s impossible to make the numbers work — then mix and match people only as necessary. 
3. Skip the Place Cards
More and more people are foregoing traditional place cards for something a bit more creative. For instance, you can design each table in a different color scheme and have someone hand guests a flower in that shade when they walk into the reception. Then, all they need to do is find the table that matches their flower. Bonus: They can take the flower home and enjoy it, and your reception venue will look stunning with that rainbow of hues. 
4. Try a Sweetheart Table
Traditionally, the bride and groom sat at a long banquet table, “the head table,” with their entire wedding party. Many modern weddings skip this tradition and seat the wedding party throughout the venue with their friends, then have the bride and groom sit solo at a sweetheart table. That allows your bridesmaids and groomsmen to enjoy the festivities without feeling like they’re on display, and it gives you and your new spouse the chance to really be in the spotlight. 
5. Consider Cocktail-Style
Does the idea of assigning seats to hundreds of guests already have you tearing your hair out? There are a few ways around it. For instance, if you opt for a cocktail-style reception where most people are standing — save for a few chairs scattered throughout for resting — you can sidestep the whole pesky seating chart. If you’re having a very small wedding, too, it’s usually fine to let guests seat themselves, as it doesn’t really matter if there are empty chairs here and there.
Planning your wedding is an exciting process, but also a stressful one. Don’t let yourself get hung up on the small stuff, like the seating chart, and forget about the main goal of the day: to get you hitched! Follow these simple tips when you start planning the seating arrangement, and you should have no problem checking this task off your to-do list and moving on to the next one.
About the Author
Kacey Bradley is the blogger behind The Drifter Collective, an eclectic lifestyle blog that expresses various forms of style through the influence of culture and the world around us. Kacey graduated with a degree in Communications while working for a lifestyle magazine. She has been able to fully embrace herself with the knowledge of nature, the power of exploring other locations and cultures, all while portraying her love for the world around her through her visually pleasing, culturally embracing and inspiring posts. Along with writing for her blog, she has written for sites like U.S. News, SUCCESS, Ruffled, and more!
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