One unfortunate fact about our wedding is that it flew by so fast we barely touched our food. We never really had the chance to savor the DIY menu — a bold choice we made instead of hiring a caterer. Call it daring or crazy, but we prepared the entire wedding meal ourselves.
When our one-year anniversary rolled around last July, we originally planned to dress up and go out for dinner — I even considered wearing my dyed wedding dress. Then my husband suggested we recreate our backyard wedding dinner at home and finally enjoy the food we’d prepared. Since we were married in our backyard, it felt fitting to grill a few items and pick up sides to relive that special night. We still own our wedding venue, so recreating the scene was easy. First we snapped a sentimental photo beneath the arch where we exchanged vows — we’d moved it from the middle of the yard to the entrance to the back woods after the wedding.
For dinner we aimed to replicate the menu our guests enjoyed a year earlier. From the three entrees we’d served at the wedding, we chose the blue cheese Angus burgers with Parmesan Caesar dressing and added a few familiar sides — lemon-pepper potato chips and rotini salad — to round out the meal.
A fitting drink was part of the experience. Before the wedding we had saved a collection of wine and beverage bottles. Instead of large plastic pitchers we wanted a clean, classic look using glass, so a local wine shop saved their used bottles from tastings for us at no cost. At home we thoroughly cleaned them and labeled each one with a Sharpie — the labeling held up perfectly. We used green bottles for water, brown for sweet tea and clear bottles for homemade mint lemonade (fresh mint plus lemonade is delicious). We also kept bottles of red and white wine and vintage glass Coca-Cola bottles on hand. Avoiding cans and plastic helped keep the presentation timeless and cohesive.
On the anniversary evening we took a shortcut and enjoyed a can of Fresca — refreshing and simple.
The meal was delightful — just look at that bite.
You might notice the lemon-and-lime napkins I’m using to dab my lips. We still had leftover napkins a year later, so that detail was easy to reproduce. Here they are on the tables exactly 365 days earlier.
We also saved two wedding cupcakes on the night of the wedding: wrapped in wax paper and tucked into a Tupperware container, they spent the year in the freezer. Eating those cupcakes on our first anniversary felt special — and they thawed beautifully.
To top the night off, we recreated our wedding photobooth tradition. We drove to a nearby diner and sat in a booth to get a photostrip for just a few dollars — something we love doing to commemorate special days. Those strips now live in a cup on our open dining room shelves.
That became our first-anniversary tradition. For our second anniversary this year we debated repeating the at-home BBQ, but instead chose to dine at Brio, the Italian restaurant where we held our rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding. It was a delicious throwback and felt right for the occasion.
We left the restaurant happily stuffed and snapped a few photos in the backyard before heading out — this time posing in front of the hedges where our family portraits were taken on the wedding day.
After dinner we stopped by the downtown diner for another photobooth strip and called it a perfect evening.
So that’s how we celebrated our first two anniversaries: one recreated at home with our wedding food and traditions, the next at a favorite restaurant connected to our wedding memories. What do you do to mark your anniversaries each year?
To read more about how we DIYed our wedding food and created an upscale backyard experience, see the details in our wedding album.
p.s. We have a huge announcement coming in a few days — stay tuned!