Couples Set a Date With History in Mass New Year’s Weddings

Whether it’s a mass ceremony in Bangkok or a private one in Nantucket, thousands of couples are planning New Year’s nuptials.

And it looks like this New Year’s Eve is shaping up as the world’s largest wedding party.

“We think that Jan. 1, 2000, will have the single most weddings in history,” says John Locher, publisher of Everything2000.com (https: //www.everything2000.com), a Seattle-based Web site that bills itself as the one-stop resource for millennium events and information. “Jan. 1, starting at midnight, seems to be the trend.”

Tina Forcier, 27, and Jason Bradley, 24, will say “I do” at Minnesota’s Mall of America one minute past midnight. Dating six years and engaged for three, the Florida couple “wanted something original” for their wedding night.

A Plethora of Nuptial Packages

“It’s neat because it’s the turn of the century and everything, but we’ve been together for so long that after a while it gets to be like you’re already married. I think this will make it an even bigger event, like a marriage should be,” says Forcier, who will have the gigantic mall’s Chapel of Love for an hour and a half and pay $2,000 for the privilege.

In contrast, the Hotel Crescent Court in Dallas is offering a $140,000 “Wedding of the Century” package. It includes the wedding gown, ceremony, flower arrangements, reception, hotel accommodations for as many as 250 guests, a breakfast buffet and two first-class, round-trip tickets to Los Cabos, in Baja California, Mexico, for the honeymoon. Also, for the next 10 years the couple will get one free weekend stay at the Crescent Court.

The package has been available since June but, with only 33 days to go, the hotel hasn’t had any takers. “It probably won’t happen,” says Traci White, marketing coordinator for the hotel, which is host to about 70 weddings each year. “A lot of people think it’s really interesting and exciting, but the ones that are calling to actually find out about having a wedding here are a little turned off by the price.”

The 100 couples signed up for a mass New Year’s Eve wedding in Wilmington, Del., will get a bigger bang for their buck. The $30 license fee includes a bouquet, boutonniere, pre-ceremony reception, wedding cake, photos and a “millennium marriage certificate.” At precisely midnight, as a fireworks display explodes over the waterfront, Clerk of the Peace Ken Boulden will pronounce the newlyweds husband and wife.

As fate would have it, Boulden, who has been marrying couples for three years, will be performing his 2,000th ceremony that night.

“I have this vision of 100 or so brides tossing their bouquets over a sea of people,” says Boulden, who says he has been getting phone calls about New Year’s Eve since the Fourth of July.

Despite numerous requests, the Queen Mary in Long Beach decided not to have any New Year’s Eve weddings this holiday season.

“We have so much going on aboard the ship for a millennium celebration. It’s just not feasible to do it,” says Sandy Helton, coordinator for the ship’s Royal Wedding Chapel, which can handle as many as seven wedding ceremonies a day.

Some wedding planners feel the mass weddings planned in several cities worldwide are just the beginning, believing the biggest rush to get married Dec. 31 will be spontaneous.

“I think it’s going to be more of a last-minute thing,” says Toby McDonald, manager of Brides International bridal shop in Beverly Hills. She says she hasn’t seen an increase in business yet but expects to next month.

“If I were to get married, I would get married on Dec. 31 and then turn around and do it again the next day. I mean, how often does this happen--that you can get married in two different years, two different centuries and two different millenniums?”

Dec. 31 already is a popular day to get married in the United States, second only to Valentine’s Day. “Lots of people get married on [those days] for the same sorts of reasons--the spiritual, religious significance of the day,” says Jennifer Ross, marketing manager of Dreamweavers.com (https://www .dreamweavers.com), a wedding-planning Web site. “People will always be able to remember it. It’s good for grooms.”

On the last day of 1998 in Las Vegas, the self-styled wedding capital of the world, couples waited for as long as five hours to get a marriage license. Cheryl Vernon, marriage license bureau supervisor for Clark County, says 531 of the 110,000 licenses that her office processed last year were issued on New Year’s Eve, with similar numbers on New Year’s Day. Expecting an even greater rush this year, Vernon plans to double her staff.

Anxious Planners Await Big Season

But some party planners are still waiting for the masses to make up their minds.

“I think a lot of people are waiting for the hotel room prices to go down” from the current $350-a-night, three-night minimum stay, says Shannon Maloney, manager of the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel on the strip. Her chapel has booked a handful of couples for a midnight marriage but hopes to marry even more in a mass ceremony that costs $1,999 and features not only Elvis but impersonators doing John Travolta’s “Saturday Night Fever” character Tony Manero and the character from “The Godfather,” Don Corleone.

“One of the things people like about a New Year’s Eve wedding in general is it’s a built-in scene,” says Millie Martini Bratten, editor in chief of Bride’s magazine. “It’s a good time, while they have everyone together, to have a big party.” And New Year’s Eve falling on a Friday this year makes it an even better night to celebrate, she says.

Acknowledging that New Zealand will be one of the first places on the planet to experience the dawn of a new century, the Parliament has repealed a law banning wedding ceremonies between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

Y2K fever also has spawned a wide variety of commemorative memorabilia, and bridal wares are no exception. Online wedding registries are filled with millennium-themed items--from cuff links to china to champagne flutes. Lazare Diamonds even offers a Y2K engagement ring, with the year “2000” engraved on the stone.

“The fact that the millennium is really 2001 . . . is not important. It’s the big celebratory time because it’s the nines turning to zeros,” says Everything2000’s Locher. Still, he figures the weddings inspired by millennial fever won’t cool off until January 2001, which statisticians and academicians have noted is the real kick-off date of the new millennium.

“From 2000 to 2001,” he says, “we’ll see this again.”