New England couples are no longer willing to settle for less than their dream wedding after years of cancellations, rescheduled dates and scaled-down celebrations. And with those dreams have come new traditions, shaped by the pandemic, of incorporating intimacy and individuality into their special day. “That’s what’s different now between your mom’s wedding and your wedding,” said Molly Chalmers, co-owner of Finishing Touch Events , a Newburyport planning company.
“You don’t have to have anything you don’t want to.” Boston area planners said this year’s requests from their New England clients signal an industry switch that could last for years to come. “Everything has been in a constant shift since 2020,” Nicole Simeral, owner of Nicole Simeral & Co , a Boston-based luxury event planner, said.
Her wedding clientele looks for venues mostly in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and, for some, foreign destination locations. The backlog of weddings caused by the pandemic has finally eased this year, the planners said. “In May 2021, we had this massive surge of people calling — it was a backlog of basically 16 months, and so it stayed really, really, really busy,” Simeral said.
“This year,” said Chalmers, “definitely kind of feels like we are out of the COVID bubble and back into more normal kind of trends.” It’s ushered in a new era of wedding traditions — ones that go beyond omitting the bouquet and garter tosses — though they have become .