What Is a Wedding Celebrant?
(My Neighbours Still Don't Know, So I Made a TikTok About It)
A few months ago I filmed a little sketch on my doorstep. Two versions of me. One asking, in that classic "quick question" tone, "What's a wedding celebrant?" The other trying to explain it while very obviously losing the room halfway through, the way people do when someone asks about your job and their eyes glaze over by sentence three.
It's now sat at 184,700 views, 2,282 likes and 155 saves, which tells me one thing loud and clear. Nobody actually knows what a wedding celebrant is. Not my followers, not my neighbours, and if I'm honest, not even some of my own family before I started doing this for a living.
So let's actually answer it properly.
A wedding celebrant is someone who works with a couple, from the very first conversation, to write and lead a completely bespoke ceremony. Not a template. Not a script pulled off a shelf. Your actual love story, structured into words, read aloud by someone who's spent hours getting to know how you met, what you love about each other, and what you want this particular hour of your life to feel like.
Wondering what a wedding celebrant actually does?
Luxury celebrant Kathryn B Wilson explains, with the viral TikTok that proves nobody quite knows.
One comment on the video asked, quite fairly, "so a wedding planner?" Nothing like a wedding planner, and it's worth being precise about the difference, because I get this one a lot. A wedding planner handles the logistics, the venue, the flowers, the timeline, the seating chart. A registrar handles the legal side, the bit that makes the marriage official on paper, following a fixed script with very little room to personalise. A celebrant is neither of those. My entire job is the ceremony itself: the words, the story, the fifteen or twenty minutes where everyone in the room actually stops checking their phone because what's being said is genuinely about the two people standing in front of them.
That's the part people don't picture when they hear "celebrant." They imagine someone reading from a book. What actually happens, on the day, is that a couple's whole relationship and love story gets built into something they'll remember word for word, told by someone who was trusted to write it properly.
For the kind of weddings I work on, at places like Blenheim Palace or Cliveden House, that distinction matters even more. A grand setting deserves a ceremony that matches it, not a generic script that could belong to anyone. The venue sets the scene. The ceremony is what makes it yours.
So if you're currently the person on the other end of that "what do you actually do?" conversation, or you're planning a wedding and wondering who's meant to write the bit everyone actually listens to about you and your relationship, that's the job. And if you'd like to talk about yours, get in touch.