For cannabis couples living in legal states, bud bars are becoming fast neighbors with booze bars at 420-friendly wedding venues.
At a sold-out cannabis wedding expo in Littleton, Colorado, this past weekend, more than 70 vendors showed over 1,000 attendees how couples can can incorporate weed into their weddings. “It was a huge success. People’s minds were opening with all these different ways to serve and present cannabis, and they seeing cannabis in this mainstream way,” Philip Wolf, the expo’s host and co-creator, tells Jane Street.
It could be as simple as finding a hairdresser who’s cool with the bride smoking a joint while she gets ready, or as elaborate as having a cannabis-infused meal, a bar with cannabis cocktails, or a smoking section with bud tenders dispensing an array of joints, vapes, dabs, and so on. The bride could carry a bud bouquet, or the groom could wear a cannabis corsage.
“This isn’t our parents’ Cheech and Chong. This is an experience that covers all walks of life,” Wolf said. For the up and coming generation of married couples, weed weddings can be just as classy as their traditional counterparts. But instead of having to sneak around in parking lots and corridors to smoke a joint, the couple and their guests could do so shamelessly inside the wedding venue, itself.
“I think a lot of people who don’t consume cannabis can see it be consumed in a different light, as opposed to more typical, stigmatized ways they think cannabis is used,” says Wolf. For some, a cannabis wedding is first-time learning experience for the 420-naive. “Grandparents or in-laws being around it can be educated by bud tenders of chefs,” he adds. “It adds a different type of flair that’s new, different, and progressive.”
The sheer size of the expo speaks to just how widespread this trend has become. From Love & Marij to Bridal Bliss to CannaBride to Irie Weddings & Events, various wedding planners and other wedding-related companies are cropping up to accommodate cannabis couples and their guests.
The weed can be a thematic centerpiece of the wedding, and the dinner tables (think bongs used as flower vases), or it can be as matter of fact as a regular bar, or off to the side in a patients-only medicating section. Various factors go into how blatant the cannabis theme can be, such as the state’s medical or adult use cannabis law, how many children are in attendance, and Grandma’s tolerance to being surrounded by a skunky haze.
So whether the couple lights a joint together in place of toasting champagne, or tokes up to ease wedding jitters before walking down the aisle, cannabis weddings are elevating pot culture altogether — bringing bud out of shadows of prohibition and into a celebratory limelight.
