Country Wedding Ideas

Sleigh Rides & Horse-drawn Wagon Rides

A horse-drawn sleigh or wagon ride might be a really neat addition to your event.

An elegant reception in a beautiful tent?

To create truly spectacular look and feel to a tented wedding reception, there are load of ideas at Celebration Rentals. Lighting options, tableware, linens, tent liners, pole sleeves, chandeliers - we'll do it all for you.

An informal reception?

If you're in the mind-set to keep things informal for your wedding reception, feel free to consider a cocktail-style reception. While the food and dress can be as elegant as you like, with this arrangement, there's no set dinner time where everyone sits to eat at the same time - think mingling and visiting. This arrangement can really lend a casual feel to the reception part of the weekend.

A cookout-style reception?

And speaking of casual, events at Mountain Meadows Lodge can be elegant and formal or have a bar-b-que theme. If you want a "family back-yard" feel to your event, talk with Anne and Bill and Dave about these types of arrangements. Consider a clam-bake or a pig roast!

Get creative with place settings?

One bride last season had been collecting dinner plates since she got engaged. The dinner plates were a really cool collection of vintage china, all different patterns, all different colors. She used these (augmented by a few from us) for the wedding reception meal - the table settings were so interesting and unique - everyone was talking about them!

Make your weekend memorable!

Events at Mountain Meadows Lodge can be kick-back quiet "do nothing" weekends, endless partying weekends... or you can choose to coordinate a few group activities. Here are some ideas:

• Dawn & Steve planned a scavenger hunt as part of their Wedding Weekend. They prepared scavenger hunt forms that invited their guests to: Sink a schwagball bucket; Take a hike to a waterfall; Get your picture taken with Alice; Blow the conch shell; Catch a fish in Kent Pond; Play a tune on the piano; Feed an ungulate; Win a game of foosball; High five a ring bearer; Skip a rock. 3 bounce minimum. The completed scavenger hunts were collected in a box at in the Mountain Meadows Lodge dining room and the winners were announced at the Brunch on Sunday. The winners had their choice of Mountain Meadows Lodge T-shirts, sweatshirts, and Alice Mugs courtesy of the bride and groom.
• Jennifer and Walker in planning their wedding needed a way to get their extended family members to know each other since many of them had never met - and they wanted the group to become familiar with the grounds and all the fun things to do. They needed an "ice-breaker" and so they planned a scavenger hunt around the Mountain Meadows Lodge property. The scavenger hunt was a combination of gathering tidbits of information on family members, their photographs, and searching the grounds for hidden treasures.
• Many groups plan a picnic lunch to the waterfalls. You can set off from the lodge on foot and Mountain Meadows Lodge will pack your lunches and meet you near the falls with sandwiches, fruit, drinks and home-made cookies! After exploring the falls and splashing around a bit, head back to Mountain Meadows on the Appalachian Trail; A fantastic Vermont Green Mountain outing.
• In warmer weather: kayak races, ultimate Frisbee, whiffleball, orienteering, a swimming race to the island, disc golf, are all great activities for the sports-minded folks.
• Jill and Kenny had a whole wedding week at Mountain Meadows Lodge. The challenge was to find a way to design at least a couple of activities that the smallest kids, teens, young adults and on up to the grandparents could enjoy and participate in with equal enthusiasm. They planned golf outings, picnics, mountain biking, campfires, star-gazing and the like, but the most memorable part of that weekend for us here at Mountain Meadows was the way they spent each evening: They arranged the tables in the dining room into one large "boardroom" set-up so that all 42 guests could sit and see each other and they played "LEFT-RIGHT-CENTER". It's a simple dice game, fun to play and fun to watch and no one is really out 'til the very last minute - you have to stay at the game table to see if your turn comes up again - because it will! The groom sponsored everyone with three dollars at the beginning of the game - and some teens went home with some serious cash! What fun!
• In winter, think about jumping on a trail right at our front door for a cross-country ski outing or a snow-shoe excursion. A 10-minute drive away is down-hill skiing at Killington and Pico mountains.
• For rainy weather or for indoor folks, it seems there's always a big jigsaw puzzle going in the great room. Think about a scrabble tournament or a chess ladder - and there's plenty of fun in the game room: video games, ping-pong, foosball, and darts.

Personal touches

We'll do our best to make you and your guests to feel like family here and we encourage you to add any personal touches that you think will make your guests feel welcome and looked-after.

• Jaime & Ben opted for picnic tables and outdoor lighting rather than the traditional outdoor wedding tent. The benches from the picnic tables become the seating for the outdoor ceremony overlooking the lake.
• Tracy created customized door knob hangers for all the rooms at Mountain Meadows Lodge. Each had guests names in colorful lettering (and on the back, the customary "do not disturb".
• Matt made a fake newspaper using the local Mountain Times front page. Instead of carrying the local news, it carried all the news and details of the wedding weekend including background, history and photos of the couple.
• Rebecca and Matt created a big colorful signpost (remember the one in the TV show M.A.S.H.?) with directional arrows point to "lake" "wedding ceremony", "reception", "waterfalls", "bbq" and the like. There are shots of it here.
• Dawn and Steve placed a few baskets around the lodge and in the public restrooms filled with necessities and personal items. The items included: men’s deodorant, women’s deodorant, feminine products, Bobby pins, dental floss, chewing gum, eye drops, lint roller, hair fixative, Tums, hair bands, scrunchies, tweezers, safety pins, q-tips, germ-X, nail polish, combs, wipes, bug spray, nail clippers, emory board, spot/stain remover, mints, breath mints, ibuprofen, hand cream, Kleenex, and a small sewing kit. The items were all arranged in a baskets, wrapped in a bow and tagged with With Love, From Dawn and Steve
• Jude's Dad made a sandwich-board/placard/chalk-board that stood about 4 feet high on the lawn. He used it to announce the times of events and all the going's on for the weekend by printing in big colorful letters times and details.
• Jude's Mom made a giant cookie/cake "family tree". Here's how it worked: Two giant tree halves were on a table in the lodge dining room. One cake (half a tree) for the groom and the other half for the bride. During the Friday evening event, you walked up to the table and drew your face on a vanilla wafer using colored cake decorating tubes. Then you placed the cookie on one of the branches of the tree on the bride's side or the groom's side, and you wrote (squirted?) your name near your face. Then, after dinner when all the branches were full, Leslie gave a presentation and then the two halves of the family-tree-cake were joined together symbolizing the coming together of the two sides into a new family. Pretty cool!
  [By the way" no one could bring themselves to eat the cake since it was so cool just to look at.]
• Lauren did make-your-own-peanut-butter-n-jelly-sandwich for lunch on Saturday when her guests were hanging out.