MAZEL TOV!
T hose who grieved over the emptiness of their pandemic-era social
calendars are enjoying a better 2022 — a boom time for weddings.

More than 2.4 million weddings are expected for 2022, according to the
Wedding Report, a trade group that gathers data on the industry. According
to The New York Times, if that prediction holds up, that would be the most
weddings since 1984.

“Client load has increased. Everything feels crazy and busy,” said Rachel
Lassoff , owner of Dream Day Events, a Haverford-based company that
plans events like weddings and bar and bat mitzvahs. “It’s hard to explain,
but yeah, things everywhere have increased. More clients, more questions,
more what-ifs. More money because infl ation is killing us all!”
The majority of the celebrations planned in 2022 represented events that
were rescheduled over the past two years, the Times reported, while much
of the remainder was couples who got engaged during the pandemic.

Heidi Hiller, the CEO and creative director of Innovative Party Planners, an
Owings Mills, Maryland-based wedding planner, also saw a signifi cant uptick
in the number of weddings being organized this year. She concurred that it
is a result of restrictions put in place during the pandemic.

“During the height of the pandemic, many of our couples couldn’t get mar-
ried,” said Hiller, a Jewish resident of Pikesville, Maryland, and an active volun-
teer at the Pearlstone Conference & Retreat Center in Reisterstown, Maryland.

“They wanted to celebrate, and whether it was [that] the venue was shut down
due to the COVID restrictions ... there were just too many risks that they didn’t
want to take for themselves, for their families, for their guests.”
Many of Hiller’s clients thought about their wedding long before ever
meeting their signifi cant other, she added, and a wedding with COVID
restrictions was simply not what they envisioned.

“We’re seeing this [swell] because now that the restrictions have been
lessened and more people are vaccinated ... [they’re] still taking risks, but
they’re more willing to take them now,” Hiller said.

Lassoff , however, said that the backlog of weddings was only partially a
result of COVID.

“I had pretty steady work throughout the pandemic. We had to change
what events looked like. I never truly lost people, but it just morphed into
something else. The hardest part was that it pushed back a lot of things.

People had just stopped their lives. There’s a lot of people who held off , and
now we have this infl ux of people trying to fi nd and access all these things.

Sometimes they’re booked, sometimes all of them are booked.”
According to Lassoff , May, June, September and October are the most
popular months to get married.

“People want to be outside,” she said.

The uptick in weddings has resulted in couples having diffi culty schedul-
ing them, Hiller said. Last fall, for example, fi nding a fl orist was all but impos-
sible if a couple had not already booked one.

An additional factor complicating things is that many wedding industry
vendors are working with fewer employees than before, Hiller added. Many
industry employees lost their jobs when COVID shut things down and had
to look for work elsewhere, she said. Those former employees are not nec-
essarily in a rush to return now.

In addition, ongoing problems in the supply chain have been a challenge,
Hiller said.

“If you get engaged and choose to get
married in the next few months, you
may fi nd yourself having to get
married on a Thursday night
or at an odd time of day in
order to get the kind of
vendors that you want,”
Hiller said. JE
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