Planning a Tenth Anniversary Vow Renewal

The day I got married was the best day of my life.  Hands down.  And I don’t mean that to say that my marriage is that best thing ever to happen to me (though it probably is), but rather, that day was just awesome and exciting from top to bottom.  It was basically a huge party with all of my friends and family, and I got to plan every bit of it (well, my wife had some say as I recall…)!  It really was a perfect day.

The only problem with this, is that it has already happened.  Does that mean that my best days are literally behind me?  How can I possibly recreate that wonderful moment?  And on top of that, while we had a beautiful church wedding with the traditional dinner and dancing to follow, what about all of the other types of weddings that we could have had, but didn’t?  That was part of the reasoning behind my decision to surprise my wife with a whirlwind trip to Vegas to get married by Elvis for our fifth anniversary.  We had a fabulous and hilarious vow renewal as we sang and danced down the aisle of a little chapel, to such tunes as “Burning Love,” while Elvis cracked up in the background at my fine moves.

So an idea was born, that every five years for our anniversary we would have another wedding.  That would give us the chance to have all sorts of different kinds of ceremonies!  We could get married on a beach, or in a hot air balloon!  But the one thing that was missing, was our friends.  There are so many people that have come into our lives over these past nine years of marriage that really ought to have been at our wedding.  The only problem was, we hadn’t met them in time.  So for our tenth anniversary next year, we are thinking of having another party.  A wedding-ish party.  One with out of town guests and a ceremony of some sort, with lots of advance notice, and that includes all of the great people we have met post-original wedding.  Is such a thing possible?

The obstacles seem to be, how can we make all of our out of town guests feel very obligated to come (as obligated as if it were a real wedding), and how can we do this without it costing as much as the first wedding?  The problem with wedding venues is that they know that people will spend ridiculous amounts of money on their weddings, so they can easily and happily gouge every single one of them.  Places that normally cost much less to rent suddenly shoot way up in cost when it becomes clear that it is going to be a wedding sort of event.  Ah, capitalism.

So at this point, we are looking for ideas.  Has anyone successfully done this before?  I’m sure many people have, but I don’t know any off the top of my head.  What might be some fun places or styles to try out for a second wedding/vow renewal?  We don’t need things like a big poofy dress and 18 corsages, but we still would want to feed people somehow, and we might want some music and/or decorations.  And what could we say or do to force everyone we know to come to this party?  Would just asking nicely work, or would we need hostages?  Please leave all the answers to all of my problems in the comments below.  Thanks, internet!