Three Reasons To Choose Autumn For A Nottingham Wedding

The season that gets overlooked

Ask most couples about an autumn wedding and they picture rain. Ask anyone who has catered one and they will tell you September and early October are the best few weeks of the year to get married in this part of the country.

Three reasons, and the third is the one nobody thinks about.

1. The weather odds are better than spring

This surprises people. September in the East Midlands is drier and more settled than April, and considerably more predictable. Spring gets booked for the promise of good weather; autumn quietly delivers it more often.

You also get the light. Late afternoon in September is the best hour of the year for photographs and it lands conveniently between the meal and the evening guests arriving.

2. It is cheaper, and not by a small amount

Peak season for most venues ends in August or September, and the rate drops after it. So does competition for the date. A Saturday in October is findable a year out where the same Saturday in July went two years ago.

The saving is real enough to change what else you can afford. Couples who move from July to October routinely put the difference into the food or the drinks and end up with a better day for the same money.

3. Hot food finally makes sense

This is the one that matters to us, and it is genuinely a seasonal argument rather than a sales one.

At a July wedding, a hot buffet fights the room. People are warm, the evening is long, and what they actually want is something cold and light. By October that reverses completely. A hot buffet at an autumn wedding is the right food at the right moment, and it lands very differently from the same thing in high summer.

The same goes for a hog roast, from £7.25 a head, carved as guests come, with a fifty-guest minimum and about 3m by 5m of flat ground. Outdoors in October sounds like a risk and is in practice a better bet than outdoors in April, provided there is cover for the cooking.

What to serve when

• Drinks reception. Canapés, and take them inside. The reception is the part most exposed to the weather.
• Evening. This is where an autumn wedding is most obviously different. Sandwiches at £5.50 a head, savouries at £7.70, or the full spread at £11.00. The wedding evening buffet is priced on evening numbers rather than the whole day, which is the right way round given how late that list confirms.

Practicalities

Every buffet is 30% vegetarian as standard and vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free and halal portions are prepared separately and labelled. Final numbers seven days before.

Ask the venue one question early: whether outside catering is permitted, and whether the answer changes for the evening only. A good number of venues that insist on doing the daytime meal will let somebody else do the evening buffet, and that is usually where the saving on a wedding day actually is.

If you are weighing autumn against the alternative, the case for spring is availability. The case for autumn is everything else.