My dream wedding? Strictly Come Dancing. With costumes. And swimming!

I met up with lovely Man­ches­ter wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher Jenny from McAvoy Pho­tog­ra­phy ear­lier this month and we got chat­ting about my blog post on find­ing that child­ish excite­ment you should be enjoy­ing about your wed­ding day.

My dream wed­ding — a child’s perspective

Jenny had the brain­wave of ask­ing her daugh­ter and some class­mates about their ideal wed­ding. The lovely Eliza — fan of all things sparkly — and her friends came up trumps with some insight­ful, inter­est­ing and funny wed­ding themes.

Huge thanks to Jenny and to Eliza McAvoy for being top wed­ding researchers! This wed­ding blog post wouldn’t be pos­si­ble with­out them. And now we have the results for you… this is the future of wed­dings in the UK in the eyes of our pri­mary school children!

The Best Wed­ding Ever! Sur­vey results

What would the bride wear?

Sur­pris­ingly per­haps, a vari­ety of wed­ding dress styles came up in the sur­vey results. Seven year olds are torn over the issue of wed­ding dress colour: fewer than half of our respon­dents opted for a tra­di­tional white wed­ding dress!

Two of those who thought the bride should wear white were boys; with one boy choos­ing the favourite alter­na­tive colour choice of red (three chil­dren chose red for the wed­ding dress colour — nice one kids!)

Top answers were:

“a nice long trail­ing dress, high heels and a white head­band“
“a long turquoise fin dress“
“a red straight sparkly wed­ding dress”

What would the groom wear?

A whop­ping 62% of respon­dents chose suits for the boys. Black suits were pop­u­lar, with the trendi­est chil­dren dress­ing grooms in t-shirt and jacket (think The Fonz), another choos­ing black pants, black cardi­gan and a red tie (a very cool wed­ding look). One of the girls who’d opted for a green wed­ding dress chose a black and pink suit for her groom.

Top answers for the groom’s out­fits included:

“a nice coat, smart tie, hat, and shiny shoes” (from one of the boys — he’ll make some­one a lovely hus­band — this was a very thought­ful answer!)
“what’s a groom” (from a girl who’d given a very detailed answer about her own out­fit)
“Daddy’s black suit“

Where would you get married?

Clearly our nation’s chil­dren tuned in to the royal wed­ding in April. The most pop­u­lar loca­tion by far is West­min­ster Abbey. Fair enough, it’s not too shabby! 31% of respon­dents chose West­min­ster Abbey for their future wed­ding venue, with one opt­ing to be a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, leav­ing her options open with “a mas­sive abbey”.

A third of chil­dren asked wanted to get mar­ried in church, with one quickly adding “and an aquar­ium after”. Which shows a nice bal­ance to the wed­ding day!

Two respon­dents chose hotels for their wed­dings, one “posh” and one “in Cal­i­for­nia” — can’t argue with that! A sur­prise option was boats: two chil­dren plan to get mar­ried on boats: a cruise boat, and a lovely boat.

Who would you invite?

Chil­dren are lovely: all but one of the respon­dents chose their fam­ily and friends, with top answers along these lines:

“every­one I know“
“mummy and all my fam­ily and friends“
“Gaby, Holly, Issey, Bethan and my family”

One of the boys was the excep­tion to the rule, his answer to the ques­tion being sim­ply, “foot­ballers”.

What would you eat?

This ques­tion had some of the most care­fully thought-out and detailed responses from our sur­vey panel. Clearly food is impor­tant to the younger gen­er­a­tion. There was a very strong choco­late theme, and Jenny McAvoy spot­ted a clear emerg­ing trend for wed­dings in the 2030s: the return of the choco­late fountain!

Half of the chil­dren we sur­veyed are dead set on a choco­late foun­tain at their wed­dings. Dip­ping mate­ri­als of choice in the 2030s will be straw­ber­ries, bananas and marsh­mal­lows — yum! I like their style.

For those of us who aren’t fans of silk­ily flow­ing choco­late and oil, our young friends will be pro­vid­ing a great choice of wed­ding food with other pri­or­i­ties being choco­late cake (38%), and party food includ­ing faji­tas (from one sophis­ti­cated lit­tle boy), jam butties, cheese baguettes, pizza, cook­ies, a bar­beque and the old party favourite jelly & ice cream!

Just so you know, only one of our chil­dren even men­tioned “wed­ding cake”.

What would the flow­ers be like?

I was delighted to see the most imag­i­na­tive answer to this ques­tion was from one of the boys sur­veyed. No mess­ing about, this guy knows what he wants: flow­ers like “red vol­ca­noes”. Bril­liant — I’d go for that!

The girls opted for pret­tier flow­ers, with glit­ter on, bright and colour­ful, “on the floor and every­thing”.

Roses will still be a wed­ding favourite in years to come: 5 of the girls chose them for their wed­ding flow­ers. The boys didn’t name par­tic­u­lar flow­ers, other than a pref­er­ence for beau­ti­ful ones and “blue and red flow­ers”. (and those vol­cano ones)

Tulips were a sur­prise choice — equally as pop­u­lar as roses! I sus­pect there were some in the class­room — must have been! Inter­est­ingly, despite the insis­tence on West­min­ster Abbey as a venue, the oak trees don’t seem to have made an impression.

How would you dec­o­rate the table?

This ques­tion made me chuckle, as our chil­dren are noth­ing if not prac­ti­cal: 7 went for table cloths.

There was a def­i­nite sparkly theme for this ques­tion, with “sparkly things”, glit­ter and con­fetti being top answers from the girls! One of the girls had really thought her theme through: to go with her red dress she’d like “Red cloth on a really long table and lots of red roses” which sounds pretty lovely to me!

My favourite answer to the ques­tion of dec­o­rat­ing tables was, “Big & sparkly & they should all have a choco­late foun­tain on all of them”.

And sav­ing the very best for last…

What enter­tain­ment would you have? What fun things would you do?

We can learn from our seven-year-olds’ responses to this ques­tion. Enthu­si­asm poured out in the answers to this one: with a vari­ety of activ­i­ties from sport to magic and some more sur­real — so here’s the full list. Which would you choose to keep your wed­ding guests entertained?

1. swim­ming pool in the day and Strictly Come Danc­ing (with cos­tumes) in the evening
2. a funny show
3. singer
4. we’d play games all together and have a band (“can I get back on my bike now?”)
5. disco and a play area for kids
6. disco and a pub
7. a disco and a magic show
8. we would have a disco (the only child to con­sider this a joint decision!)
9. pan­tomime
10. funny mice
11. a strong­man that does funny things
12. a clown and JLS (together on stage I hope!)
13. danc­ing with disco balls, a magic show, louby loo and a sea lion show

Sur­veys were com­pleted by 13 chil­dren alto­gether, with 3 boys and 10 girls telling us about the ‘best wed­ding ever’. Take the per­cent­ages with a pinch of salt of course… you need 100 respon­dents to make that a valid quan­tity… but hey, I’m tak­ing a leaf out of the seven-year-olds’ books — and not pay­ing too much atten­tion to the maths!

Again, huge thanks to McAvoy Pho­tog­ra­phy. Jenny com­piled all the sur­veys and I just made the pic­tures and wrote words after­wards. Find out more about McAvoy Pho­tog­ra­phy either via their web­site at www.mcavoyweddings.co.uk or via their Eng­lish Wed­ding Show­case Page.