“This was the best wedding I’ve ever been to,” one of our guests told us. We were exhausted from our big day, but we were nonetheless glowing. Our attendees talked about how liberating it was to be able to smoke out in the open because of how isolating it had felt at previous nuptials they’d attended, where they were forced to walk around the block to enjoy a joint on an otherwise joyous day.
A weed wedding was the natural choice for us. After all, it’s a natural plant-based medicine that brings people together.
If you’re a grower in a place like Mendocino County, then planning a weed wedding is a no-brainer. Cannabis-themed location? Your own pot farm, or your friend’s grow op down the road. The newlyweds and their guests need to be able to smoke on site? Again, no problem on your private property. However, for city dwellers like me, planning a weed-themed wedding can quickly become a very complicated affair.
For those of us planning a weed wedding in an urban setting, here is the weed wedding planning guide that I wish I had when my wife and I started outlining our big day. I’ll cover finding cannabis-friendly venues, cannabis as wedding favors, the power of community, marijuana as marriage decor and fashion accessories, and alternatives to smoking weed on your wedding day for those who prefer not to partake yet still want to feel included.
The happy couple wore bud-themed boutonnieres and bouquets for their big day.
First Thing’s First: Finding A Cannabis-Friendly Location For Your Nuptials
Sourcing a pro-smoking wedding event space will probably be one of the most challenging obstacles to successfully orchestrating an elegant weed wedding. Here are four routes you can take to landing your dream venue.
1. Ask Around Within Your Cannabis Community
Many people have found out the hard way that you simply cannot pull off planning your own wedding by yourself. It takes a village. If you’re a control freak or you hate asking for help, then here’s your wake-up call. It’s time to bite the bullet and learn how to delegate some of the wedding planning tasks that are unavoidable and simply must be performed.
There was no way we could have had such a successful wedding without the generous help of all our loved ones. My wife-to-be’s friend volunteered her catering talent as a wedding gift, and another friend lent us her professional event-coordinating abilities. Two of our friends volunteered their professional photography skills. My former cannabis dispensary coworker volunteered to be the budtender at our reception. Lastly, our friend who works in the cannabis industry offered to host our ceremony and pre-rolling party.
But before we could even ask our friends for their assistance, we had to follow our golden rule when it comes to how we treat people, which is treat others how they want to be addressed. Put yourself in your friend’s shoes. Ask yourself, “How can I improve the quality of their lives, professionally or personally?”
Before our friend offered to host our wedding, we had asked her to be on our podcast, Fat Flower Potcast. Our goal was to publicize someone we think is cool, and champion the good she is doing in the cannabis community through her business.
That being said, don’t do your friends favors in hopes that they will give you something in return. Our desire to talk shop with her turned her from a simple acquaintance to a true friend who ended up hosting our wedding ceremony.
2. Search For Venues On The Internet
The location for the ceremony wasn’t some place we initially pursued as our ideal wedding destination. Rather, it came to us more or less without much deliberate effort. But nevertheless, we still needed a beautiful, appropriate site for the reception. To get this task done, we used a website called Peerspace, which allows anyone to advertise houses or places of business as an event space for rent for just about any occasion, including baby showers, film shoots and performances. Before you decide that this is how you’ll find your wedding venue, let’s break down the pros and cons of going down this path. First, the pros:
- The event-space hosts usually rent by the hour and are very affordable compared to more traditional function spaces. There is often a five-hour minimum when renting more mainstream event spaces. Sometimes these online rental spaces allow you to borrow them for less than five hours per booking.
- House rules vary, depending on the personality and sensitivities of the host. Look for a venue whose house rules include being 420-friendly. You don’t want to get kicked out of your own wedding or be fined crazy-expensive fees for smoking, especially on the day you marry the one you love. Talk about inauspicious beginnings.
- These aren’t your typical event spaces. They can have a lot more charm and feel way more intimate than your average venue. You will share a unique space that you, your family and friends will not forget in a hurry.
The cons:
- The quality of the event spaces varies. It won’t always be at the same level of refinement as, say, a 5-star hotel like the Four Seasons or The Ritz. There may be invisible cat dander on your host’s couches. Maybe there are lots of bugs in their jungle-themed backyard, but the host denies it, even as those bugs are biting your legs.
- Piggybacking off the previous con, the host may not be entirely forthcoming about the weaknesses of the event space. You’ll need to do your research and visit the place prior to your big day to inspect whether it’s worthy of your wedding. Website pictures can be deceiving.
- There may not be dedicated parking in these spaces, mainly if the rental is in a residential area. Your guests will most likely need to call a taxi or ride-share to get to and from your event — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if they’re planning to partake of a little curative cannabis.
3. Go To Cannabis Events That Allow On-Site Consumption
Research online for cannabis events near you. Attend those events and take notes on how the organizers and party planners set up the space for cannabis consumption. By going to these parties, you’ll know for sure if these venues allow cannabis consumption and if you must partake on site in designated areas.
Some of the events we attended in the spirit of wedding-planning intel included the So Cal Cannabis Business Investment Group, or SCCBIG, a private invite-only Meetup for the cannabis industry. It’s worth mentioning that many of the LA events and weed-themed happenings we enjoyed in the lead-up to our big day predated on-site cannabis consumption laws taking effect, which only allow for consumption at private residences.
Also worth considering is EventHi, the cannabis industry equivalent to ticketing website Eventbrite. Each EventHi gathering has a consumption or non-consumption icon associated with it.
4. A Green Oasis In A Concrete Jungle
If you live in a city that has pockets of nature within its cement confines, or you’re lucky enough to be within an hour of the great outdoors, then those spots could be potentially perfect sites to throw your spousal shindig. However, be careful and mind your local laws. Most places in Los Angeles currently don’t allow for public consumption of cannabis.
Give Your Guests Cannabis-Themed Wedding Favors
Throw A Pre-Roll Pre-Wedding Party
Although we threw a relatively small wedding, with 40 of our nearest and dearest in attendance, the 40 pre-rolls we made prior to the event would have taken many precious hours away from our wedding preparation timeline. We invited our friends to join us for a pre-roll-making party, where they happily volunteered to stuff our palm-leaf wraps with flower and wax. We made it fun by providing food, drinks and cannabis for everyone to enjoy, and a centrally air-conditioned sanctuary to escape the humid Los Angeles heat wave.
If your engagement is a brief one before you tie the knot, you may want to consider making your engagement soirée into a pre-roll party.
Look For Sponsors To Provide The Weed Wedding Favors
Your cannabis community will always be a wealth of untapped information. Reach out to them to find out if anyone knows where to get sponsors for the raw materials you need for your wedding favors. Our host asked one of her connections for palm-leaf wraps. We were able to get 100 wraps in exchange for promoting pictures of our palm leaf pre-rolls on social media, courtesy of Ophelia Chong of Stock Pot Images, who procured the palm leaf wraps by King Palm from Mighty Med Vape.
One missed connection was through one of our wedding guests @trichohm, who specializes in pesticide-free organic cannabis products and live rosin pressing. After we had packed the wedding budtending station away for the night, she told us something to the effect of, “You should have let us know! We would have sponsored your flower and wax.” Dammit!
If we had reached out to our friend prior to the wedding, then we would have easily saved $200 on flowers and concentrates. Alas, we didn’t ask, so we had a couple hundred less in our bank accounts, and our friend missed out on targeted promotion opportunity for her budding business. Do not take for granted the power of asking for help and the resources your community wants to offer to you.
Using Cannabis As Decor And Fashion Accessories
Why not incorporate cannabis into your bouquet and boutonniere?
In place of traditional real flowers, we decided to hire Kenya Reiko, an artist who works with high-quality craft paper, to create our bouquet, boutonniere and the roses for our mothers. I wanted a paper cannabis leaf boutonniere to replace a real-life cannabis leaf for my boutonniere. This is because unfortunately, the reality is the leaf would have drooped by the end of our ceremony, thanks to the August afternoon heat. Clearly, craft paper was the way to go.
Our host for the ceremony had a few cannabis plants scattered around her backyard that added to the ambiance of our nug-themed nuptials. You could breathe in the sweet, pungent aroma of her crop as you stood near them. We entertained the idea of placing the cannabis plants around us instead of having a cannabis-and-flower decorated canopy at the altar, but between the joint-rolling party and coordinating everything else, we decided on the more subtle, more mother-pleasing option.
CBD mocktails and THC mocktails are a good middle ground for guests who want to feel included without getting too wasted.
Alternative Ways To Consume Cannabis On Your Wedding Day
If you can’t land a cannabis-friendly location for your special day, then don’t fret. You can eat cannabis anywhere! The owner of your venue rental need never know you and your guests got high on the day of your wedding.
There are several approaches to incorporating cannabis into appetizers and beverages. You can infuse your drinks with marijuana and entertain everyone with CBD mocktails and THC mocktails. Cooking and baking edibles for nonsmoking-cannabis consumers is easy when using cannabis-infused cooking oils or cannabutter.
Do take caution if you decide to serve infused food and drinks. Make sure they are microdose edibles that have a low dose of THC, 5 milligrams or less. Better yet, have your budtender guard the morsels. The last thing you want is someone to get too high and green out because they overdosed on THC.
La Hoja, spearheaded by renowned chef Luke Reyes, is a California company specializing in high-end cannabis-infused cuisine, while Cannabis Catered Events, @cannabiscateredevents, is another company specializing in pop-up events and gatherings for 420-friendly food lovers.
And lastly, in the lead-up to that nail-biting walk down that aisle, there’s nothing wrong with a calming toke to soothe your nerves, or toasting the speeches with a little Kush rather than Cristal. Bottoms up!
