Intimate Wedding Reflections — Sierra Bride Magazine

Whether it was a chance opportunity, a relinquished dream, or purposefully planned, intimate weddings and elopements saw their rise last year. Some were simple unions in comfortable locations. Some were recreated to mimic the details and styling of a large wedding with almost as many details. Some were created to be meaningful masterpieces of their own. In all places, couples had ample opportunity to celebrate their love in decidedly more intimate ways.

Now, one year later, we asked the couples featured in Issue No. 3’s “Rise of the Micro Wedding” feature to look back and share their thoughts on what led them to the intimate wedding experience and how they feel about it in the present day.

We decided to do a 5-person micro wedding on the North Shore of Lake Tahoe after postponing our full-sized July 2020 wedding in Sonoma to the following year. The venue was a house rental right on the lake where we stayed for the weekend with our siblings, cousin, and dogs. We found our photographer through our wedding planner and florist through Instagram. Julia's mom and sister did most of the planning, her sister officiated the ceremony, and our family members from near and far pitched in to make the most delicious food and prettiest decorations. We actually had to postpone by a day at the very last minute due to a huge storm over the lake, and everyone rallied to make sure our wedding ceremony was perfect the following day. We ended up with a beautiful sunny wedding day in our favorite place with a few of our very favorite people, and we are so happy we chose to go this route rather than waiting to officially marry until 2021. We are doing the larger Sonoma wedding celebration next month, and are excited to renew our vows and celebrate with more of the people we love. Julia & Joe
Photography: Kay Kroshus | Floral Design: Love and Lupines

James proposed at Cascade Falls in August of 2019. Wedding season 2020 was originally booking up fast in Tahoe, so we actually had most of our vendors in place before the pandemic hit. We set our wedding for October 18, 2020, because we both love October, especially in Tahoe. As it became clear that Covid would be widespread and there wouldn't be a vaccine in time for our wedding, we made the difficult decision to downgrade to a styled elopement. We only moved to California a few years ago, so almost all of our friends and family would have had to fly in, and a number of them were high-risk. We didn't want anybody we loved getting sick because of us, but the alternative of constantly rescheduling all of our vendors until the stars finally aligned sounded quite stressful. We had already been together for 8 years when we got engaged and we knew we wanted to try for a family soon, so we decided that it didn't make sense to delay our wedding. Although it wasn't the celebration that we had originally planned, our wedding day was still perfect! We got to focus on each other and we were even able to keep most of our vendors, who pulled off a magical day for us. Without a wedding looming, we've been able to focus on getting ready for the arrival of our baby girl this fall!

Planning: MiraWED Photography: Charleton Churchill Floral: Milwood Florist Baker: Flour Girl Wedding Cakes

We went from planning a 200+ person wedding to a -20 person one and it was one of the best decisions we have made. Having a microwedding allowed us to have the best of both worlds. We had a highly styled wedding but on a smaller budget which meant we could splurge and truly customize the experience. At first, we questioned whether it would feel like enough or if we would want to plan a "real" wedding later. Nearly a year out, we can share that it not only felt real but that it was better than any big wedding we could have planned thanks to our amazing vendor team!
Theresa & Mark