Who Cares About Chairs?

Ah, the great chair debate. I don't understand how the WIC (that's Wedding Industrial Complex, for anyone not in the crazy wedding planning phase of life) worked it's weird WIC magic and made it so brides would freak out about chairs (read the comments; they're full of smart ladies, this one in particular), but uh...hi.  I am an otherwise perfectly sane human being, and I am a bride who has freaked out about chairs.  Twice.

First it was the reception seating.  Our venue provides these perfectly fine, albeit somewhat conference-center-esque, chairs.  For free.  They mentioned that we could rent chair covers to match the linens if we want to, and that a lot of people do that to make it all look nicer or whatever.  Sure, sounds easy enough.  But, uh, chair covers? They don't come cheap, yo.  That's a minimum of $4 per chair, $5 if you include a chair sash - or just $1 if you only want a sash, but uh, that would look odd. Why tie a ribbon around a normal chair? It would just call attention to the fact that we didn't get chair covers, I think.  And that all just seemed silly.

I took this picture when we checked out the venue.
Chairs are fine. They're just chairs.

We thought back to weddings we'd been to, and couldn't remember what kind of chairs were in the reception room. I had to look at pictures of the wedding I'd been to barely a month before to remember what kind of chairs they'd used (I looked - they used fancy chairs, that we were being quoted like, $7.95 per chair for. Yikes!).  So I finally said, "Screw it.  Nobody is going to care if we don't get fancy linen covers for the chairs.  Besides, they kind of coordinate with the carpet (which we also don't love, but who's gonna be staring at the carpet)? And also, who cares about chairs?"

So, no on spending $400-500 on chair covers.  Yay!  Ah, but the Saga of the Seating was not over yet!

We had planned to rent wooden benches for the ceremony, which is going to be outside (hopefully in the snow, fingers crossed, though the forecast does not look good).  Ideally, it would look like this:

So woodsy! So wintery! So quaint!

But alas, renting enough benches for our guests (even assuming some choose to stand on the deck above) would cost us around $500.  And now that there may not even be snow, it seems silly to rent wooden benches, just because they look cute.  We can't even rent the ones pictured above (they don't have enough, and they are being super flaky), so we'd be renting slightly less cute ones anyway.  Harumph.  Bridal whine.  But I'm over it.

You know why?  Because the venue provides perfectly fine white folding chairs, for free, that we can use, for free, and they looked perfectly fine when we saw the venue the first time, when there was no snow, and hell, I'm sure the white chairs would look fine in the white snow if the weather cooperates.

With a view like this,
who cares what kind of chairs you're sitting on?

Why did I get it into my head that white folding chairs would just be awful?  That it was just laughably silly for us to use white chairs?  That of course we were going to rent benches, because duh, we could. They were available, and look how cute they look in the pictures! And obviously, they're cute, and it's easy, and we are doing it!  Without even questioning whether we needed to (ha! it's our wedding! we can do what we want!) or really cared about it (very important) in the first place.  Personally, I'd rather take that $500 and use it towards the honeymoon.  Or saving for a down payment on a house.  Or anything other than benches that people will sit on for 15 minutes.  Even if they do look really cute.

We have been emailing back and forth for the better part of a week, trying to figure out what company to rent the benches from, and how many benches to rent, and what's going to happen if we don't have enough benches, and well, it just all feels very silly to me right now.  I just want to get married to my best friend, and have a fun party with our family and friends.  No matter what they're sitting on.