Over the past eleven years, I’ve stayed on as editor-in-chief of, which has gone from a blog being written at my kitchen table to one of the largest wedding publications in the English language. All of which gives me the opportunity to update this book for today’s (still kind of terrible, but now with different issues) wedding industry. (Were they imagining brides, or confusing them with four-year-olds? It remains unclear.) But with more than one hundred thousand copies of my books sold, and countless dog-eared pages passed from hand to hand, we can now prove that they were wrong all along. The brides publishers imagined-and they never imagined anyone but brides-wanted binders filled with endless lists telling them how to have a huge wedding where they could feel like princesses. When I first pitched this book, publishers told me nobody would want to read it. I wrote this book while simultaneously riding the high of our amazing wedding and feeling enormous rage at the wedding industry. They also insisted on constantly using the phrase “Your Big Day,” a term that made me upset then, and still makes me upset now. We were coming out of the depths of the Great Recession, but every wedding publication in existence assumed that people getting married had piles and piles of money to spend, a professional wedding planner, and a baseline desire to look like a puffy white cupcake. It’s never really been a beacon of sanity or progressive values. At the time, the wedding industry was in a terrible moment. But for me, it was a year and a half after our wedding, and I had been publishing for three years. You might remember this as the Time Before Pinterest Exploded.

So here’s to the joyful wedding, the sensible wedding, the unbelievably fun wedding! A Practical Wedding is your complete guide to getting married with grace. Meg walks you through everything from choosing a venue to writing vows, complete with stories and advice from women who have been in the trenches: the Team Practical brides. Why that color-coded spreadsheet is actually worth it How to communicate decisions to your family.DIY-ing your wedding: brilliant or crazy?.How to pinpoint what matters most to you and your partner.The real purpose of engagement (hint: it’s not just about the planning).In this refreshing guide, expert Meg Keene shares her secrets to planning a beautiful celebration that reflects your taste and your relationship. After all, what really matters on your wedding day is not so much how it looked as how it felt. A companion to the popular website and A Practical Wedding Planner, A Practical Wedding helps you sort through the basics to create the wedding you want - without going broke or crazy in the process.

A practical wedding by meg keene