How to Throw an Alice in Wonderland Wedding

5 min readMar 1, 2019

Ever thought that a theme wedding might be for you? Alice in Wonderland is a great example of a classic children’s story that allows you and your guests to embrace the weird, wonderful, and wacky when it comes to design and decor at your wedding. Follow these tips to create a memorable Alice in Wonderland wedding.

Embrace the Weird: Everything Off-Kilter

One of the things that this wedding won’t be is perfect, prim, or poised. You’re going to have to embrace the silly and the strange a little as you make your choices — and that is a great thing! To begin, select your favorite version (or versions!) of Alice in Wonderland, be they the book or some of the movies. Grab a pad of paper and your fiancé (hopefully they’re just as mad about Alice as you are) and snuggle in for an evening of watching and brainstorming. Your ideas are the most important ones, but we’ve also compiled a list here of potential ways to create a fun and whimsical wedding.

Alice in Wonderland Theme Wedding Components

Choose a wooded area or a beautiful cottage as the scene for your outdoor Alice in Wonderland wedding. So many of the fun scenes from the movies are outside as Alice explores, so give yourself an excellent venue to work with, even if it’ss an inexpensive permit to have your wedding in a wooded park!

Make the food and beverage reflect the most iconic moments: small cakes marked “eat me” in icing and delicious refreshing beverages in antique glass bottles marked “drink me.” Start thrifting early and you’ll find a lot of fun and inexpensive options for the glassware.

While you’re thrifting, keep an eye out for antique tea cups of all kinds. They can be the main feature in your table centerpieces, especially if you lean in on the entire reception being a “Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.”

Cute touches for the wedding outfits can involve a pocket watch, an enormous top hat, or something with a playing card element. Many Alice-esque brides choose a pair of bright black-and-white striped stockings to add a whimsical flair to their wedding outfit.

Use some beautiful antique clocks as decorations. If you can’t souce these from thrift stores, ask some older people you know if you can borrow theirs for the wedding celebrations.

For flowers, I recommend red and white roses; if possible, get a big batch of white roses and spend some time adding red paint with your girlfriends the night before the wedding. (“We’re painting the roses red…”)

Old keys make for great jewelry or decorations, given the need for the key to the secret garden where Alice always wants to find herself.

Playing cards, even the enormous sets that are 4×6 inches or larger, make inexpensive options for place cards, programs, or other paper items that are needed, like menus. If you don’t want to put calligraphy onto actual cards, use a word processor to make a card-themed document online and print it out.

For a surprise touch, go with a powder blue ballgown rather than a traditional wedding dress, or switch into this Alice-esque beauty after the ceremony for the reception.

Old books and picture frames also work well for decorations, especially if they can be strung into trees or placed off-kilter on walls.

Speaking of off-kilter, figure out what kind of interesting silliness you can manufacture for your guests. Can you put up a door in the middle of nowhere, or an enormous door and a tiny door, and make them find the keys while you and your fiancé take pictures? Big, oversized games, from chess or checkers to Jenga, are also great options for entertaining guests while you and your spouse get those last photos in before dinner.

Let your cake baker go nuts: do they want to re-create the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat, or Tweedledee and Tweedledum? See what kind of amazing sugar and chocolate work they can perform to make your cake thematic and also a memorable work of sugar art. For a simpler option, white iced cookies with playing card decorations always work well!

Themed treats for the wedding make sense as well. If you’re hosing a dry wedding, a variety of hot and cold teas would make for elegant drink options. If a wetter wedding is your plan, you can always work with your bartender to get a few drinks that feature tea in some form!

No matter how you choose to make an Alice in Wonderland theme wedding look on your big day, know that you can get in the spirit of Alice’s adventure throughout your marriage. See everything as something to learn from and you’ll find a lot of happiness in the adventures together.