While summer is normally prime time for nuptials, the hottest wedding date this year is in December.
Couples are desperately hoping to tie the knot Dec. 13 — 12/13/14.
Jennifer Krysiak, 31, who works as an educational director of a preschool in Queens, was inspired by a friend who married on 7/7/07.
“I wanted to have a cool wedding date, too,” Krysiak says. “I always wanted a winter wedding, so I originally picked Dec. 6. But that wasn’t cool, and when I found out that 12/13/14 fell on a Saturday, I knew I had to pick it. We started planning as soon as we got engaged last September.”
Some 20,000 couples marry in the US on 12/13/14, according to a David’s Bridal poll — about 7,200 pairs wed the same weekend last year.
But it won’t be easy for everybody who vows to get hitched that day.
“We’ve had to turn a lot of people away,” says Julie Miller, the production manager at The Foundry, a popular venue in Long Island City (and where the character Jessa was married on HBO’s “Girls”). “We’ve gotten 20 requests for the day since we booked it [a few months back], and December is generally a quiet month for us.”
New York-based DJ company Scratch Weddings says they’ve seen a 300 percent increase in requests over the same weekend last winter.
Columbia University law student Zila Acosta called all over town looking for a venue to host her 12/13/14 wedding. “There were tons of places that I looked at that were like, ‘We’re booked. We’ve been booked,’ ” she says. “A lot of the main hotels told me, ‘We have, like, three interested couples ahead of you.’ ” The 25-year-old brideto- be was finally able to score her school’s Low Library Rotunda for the reception.
Cassandra Gray, a Staten Island real estate agent, feels lucky she got the date. “My dad was born on the 13th,” says Gray, 39. “I like it because most people think it’s an unlucky number, but anywhere I see the number 13, I see it as lucky.”
Wedding stores are gearing up for the crush.
“I’ll put extra staff on the night before and the morning of, just to be prepared for those brides who walk in and need a dress that morning,” says Stacey Rywelski, the store manager of Chelsea’s David’s Bridal, who saw a spike in City Hall brides desperate for a dress the morning of 11/12/13. (Last year, on Tuesday, 11/12/13, City Hall saw twice as many weddings as a typical Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported.)
And venues across the country are hoping to cash in. Many hotels and chapels in Las Vegas are advertising 12/13/14 wedding packages — Caesars Palace is offering a chapel ceremony with two buffet lunches for $1,213.14. And one lucky couple already snagged the “12, 13, 14 . . . Eternity” package on Little Palm Island in the Florida Keys. The resort there offered the package for $195,000, which bought the pair the entire private island for the weekend.
With demand, of course, prices may increase, says Jamie Miles, editor of theknot. com. “Ask in advance before booking the venue, because if you know two weeks later, ‘I could do this and it would be a quarter of the cost,’ it might be worth waiting — it depends on how set you are on getting married on that day.”
If a sequential wedding date is a must-have and it’s too late for December, you’ll have to wait another two decades for Jan. 2, 2034 — or 1/2/34.