Local Love: Maggie and Luke

May 14, 2022

Their Love Story

Luke and I met in 2016 when our two separate Saint Patrick’s Day Parties decided to combine at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen NYC. At the bar, we spent the entire night alone in a corner talking about our shared love of Lancaster, where I had grown up and left for college in NYC, while Luke had grown up in New York but attended college in Lancaster. As the night was winding down, a friend encouraged Luke to ask for my number and the rest is history.

Fast forward to 2019, after living together and knowing that our relationship was the real deal, Maggie was offered a job in Switzerland. We decided it was time to make the next step official. In March, Luke planned a weekend at a remote cottage near Lake Placid, New York and asked me if we could spend the rest of our lives being silly together.

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Their Inspiration

Luke and I wanted our wedding to be an excuse for our loved ones to experience a relaxing weekend in Lancaster, a city that holds special meaning for both of us, capped with a party full of personal moments from our relationship, strong drinks & sweet desserts.

As we planned the weekend, we were careful to consider the comfort and convenience of our guests as we planned. We chose Excelsior that could manage our full event in house & walking distance of several hotels, and we the team there to make sure that everything was organized and efficient. We had pre-made drinks available during the ceremony and at happy hour to keep the bar lines short, and we did our first dances during cocktail hour so that the dance floor would be open for as long as possible.

From a design perspective, we centered traditional Lancaster & Pennsylvania Dutch elements through the visual motif of hex signs, and traditional sticky buns as an addition to our wedding cake. Aesthetically we stuck to clean lines & bright colors to ensure a modern feel. We affectionately referred to our wedding plan as a Pennsylvania Dutch Disco.

One of our favorite parts of the design process was our work with Laura from Paper Jane to create twenty images representing our relationship and we featured those throughout the wedding for a more personal feel.

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Their Advice

Everyone gave us the advice to pick what mattered to us most and prioritize that in our budget & energy, and this is fantastic advice. It is important to decide what matters least and where you trust others to make decisions on your behalf. Decision fatigue during wedding planning is real.

For Luke and me, we were planning a wedding while being long distance and being unable to travel to each other due to country restrictions, so this became essential. We did this in two ways:

Where we felt our vendors understood our vision and could make something better than we ever dreamed, we allowed them nearly full creative control to surprise us on our day. This resulted in the fun wedding cake of our dreams from Blayre (Flouretta Sweet) and the most talked about element of our wedding, the incredible show stopping flower arrangements from Tara (Splints & Daisies).

Where the decisions were not a priority to us or were small details like napkin color & sign design, hand it over to a decisive loved one or your wedding planner. My sister-in-law Madeline & our Day of Coordinator Cindy (Planned Perfection) were a godsend and would quickly take these little decisions off our plate to keep us focused on what mattered.