Happy Monday! A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an event I worked for a couple who was celebrating their 60th Wedding Anniversary. The original wedding was a Christmas themed wedding so the kids of this happy couple decided upon a Christmas theme for this party too!

We started out with faux foliage wreaths. You can find these at any craft store early in the season but even grocery stores will carry them the closer to the holiday it gets. These had round red and white lights that didn't blink. We then added the ribbon, fresh flowers and the gold and rhinestone wire covered pillars to the wreath to complete the centerpiece.

We considered using red tablecloths but realized that the ribbon and roses would blend right into all of that red and be overwhelmed. One thing to remember when first getting organized is to ask your venue what they provide. This venue not only covered all of the table settings, flatware and stemware but also all of the linens and were able to accomidate our choice of the camel color cloths with the red napkins.

You can see how simply elegant this set up ended up being. Many times you consider doing huge centerpieces when, in fact, a small, low centerpiece actually helps to facilitate conversations across a large table. These tables normally seat 10 but we wanted each guest to have plenty of elbow room so we reduced the settings from 10 to 8 instead.

The room held 4 of these tables easily. This left enough "mingle" room for cocktails before dinner as well as the very touching slide show on the wall to the right. By not overcrowding the tables, or the room, the guests had plenty of room to visit each of the conversation groups as well as enjoy the slide show.

As with all of our events, it's the small details that make all the difference. The plain red napkins, that you would find at any nice restaurant, were dressed up with one red rose bud and then tied with gold ribbon. I had several guests tell me how beautiful it was to find that waiting for them and how they loved the fact that they, too, were showered with roses.

With any venue you will find "dead spaces" this is a table or a corner or even a restroom that has a "bare" look to it and you will need to dress it up. This was easily done with containers available right there at the venue. Just some rose buds, babies breath and two of the wired candles along with a vase full of the "Bride's" favorite flowers helped dress up this corner.

When an event follows a holiday it's really easy to re-use anything from that holiday. We removed the no longer fresh flowers from this arrangement that had been received earlier in the month and replaced them with fresh roses, spider mums and carnations to give this arrangement new life and allow us to use it to fill up the "dead space" near the coffee bar.

The fireplace was a lovely touch in this room but had some not so elegant silk flower arrangements flanking it. We replaced those with the nutcrackers and red rose filled glasses.

These were really quite simple. Just stemmed drink glasses that each had a handful of glass marbles in the bottom. We then filled them about 1/2 full of water and inserted large groups of babies breath and a single red rose each. 

The venue still had the Christmas tree up so we requested they leave it in place for part of our decor! We set up the cake table to hold not only the cake but the vintage photos of the couple and their original wedding photo album for guests to enjoy.

We dressed up the base of the cake with trimmed carnations, red rose buds and petals. All you do is trim off the top of a carnation right where the petal meets the greenery. You end up with beautiful ruffles to surround your cake, line your aisle or whatever extra decoration you would like. A very inexpensive but beautiful treatment! We loved the antique looking invitation for the event as well. It really helped set the mood!

And finally, the cake. The client wanted something that looked like Christmas and Winter and snow and she fell in love with the idea of large crystal sugar for the snow effect. The top and bottom sugared tiers were both Double Chocolate with Dark Chocolate Brownie Buttercream filling. The extra tall middle tier was Lemon Chiffon cake with Lemoncurd Buttercream filling. It was topped with red sugar roses and wrapped with a big gold Christmas bow which was the only non edible part of the cake. You can find out more about this cake and how it was made on our Cake Blog !

As always I was very honored to be included in such a special celebration. Not only is it fun to watch your designs come to life, to be able to create more while you are there setting up, but to watch as the event comes together, as the guests of honor see and enjoy what you have created and the event that is just for them is the best part of my job. I am in awe of 60 years of marriage and very honored to have had a small part of their celebration.

We'll be looking at an Alice in Wonderland themed grown up birthday party next week! As always, you can get lots of tips and tricks on a daily basis over at our Facebook page. Hope to see you there!

Cat