Bridal Trade Show: Spinellis

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Since we’re going to be at the mercy of immigration when it comes to planning a wedding, and due to a personal family situation we can’t start that process yet, Adam has said it’s too early to start planning a wedding.

And out of respect for his wishes, I don’t let on that it’s all I think about in my spare time.

So being a total noob when it comes to planning a wedding, I started Googling around.  First I looked up florists.  Yup.  Got a list of florists in Massachusetts.  Um.  Okay, I guess I try cakes now.  Right, these places make cakes.  Great.  I didn’t have much direction at this point.  And by the way, florists and wedding cake bakeries don’t put prices on their website just to make things more difficult.  But as I was clicking around hoping for pictures or something to feed my wedding-lust, I came upon Spinellis website.  Spinellis is a restaurant not too far from where I work, and the teachers and parents rave about their cakes, so I looked at their site, and found a whole wedding section.  And then, at the top of the page, I saw a banner saying “click here to register for the New England Bridal Show.”

Oooh.

So I did, and I learned there are actually THREE bridal shows hosted by New England Bride, and one of those was near me too.  And they are free.  And I can bring a guest.  So I put +1 and called mom and she said she’d love to go.

Now, I had been to a business expo before.  So I figured similarly, at a bridal trade show that there would be tables, and you’d get a bag, and people at the tables would give you pamphlets and maybe a piece of candy or pen or whatever.  And they basically had a room just like that.  Only pretty and wedding-y.

What I was NOT prepared for at my first bridal trade show was the other room.  There were no vendors in there.  Just FOOD.  So much food!  A waiter was walking around with glasses of champagne with a strawberry on the rim.  Followed by more waiters, with all sorts of little hors d’oeuvres.  And then there was a carving station, where we could try the chicken saltimbocca.  And the pasta station with a tomato sauce and one with a cream sauce.  And the samples of wedding cake.  And the dessert buffet that took up about 4 tables.  I could not believe this.  Registration for the bridal trade show was free, and all this food was just free for the taking?  We had SO much fun. 

Eventually we DID go to the other room to talk to the vendors.  The other surprise for the evening was we were given a sheet of stickers with my contact information on it, and as we went to each table there were raffle tickets to stick them on.  I didn’t win anything, but I was impressed with the system the New England bridal show used because I didn’t have to write my name 50 times.  It was a good setup.  And I am well aware that the point of these is for vendors to send me a ton of their junk mail, at least I gave a rarely used Email address to cut down on some of it. 

So I collected brochures, pamphlets and cards, smiled and nodded politely at the vendors.  After all, I had no idea what I was doing.  So while they had hundreds of other girls to introduce themselves to, I had a buffet line to get back to. 
 

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Photo courtesy of:
Emery Co Photo