In `Christmas City,' Yuletide weddings are main event
In December, most wedding venues experience a slowdown. But at Historic Hotel Bethlehem, wedding season is in full swing.
That's because the residents of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, about 80 miles west of New York, do not take Christmas lightly. Branded as “the Christmas City,” the town features a Main Street that in December is bustling with holiday shoppers wearing red Santa hats, carolers belting out “Let it Snow” and the tinkling of jingle bells. It feels like a scene pulled straight out of a Hallmark movie. Every storefront is adorned with ornaments, and at the center of the action lies the hotel. Its entrance is decorated with illuminated stars, garlands intertwined with twinkling lights and a giant red bow.
On Dec. 9, in one of the hotel's two ballrooms, Steven Tyler Mullen waited in a velvet green tuxedo by a grand Christmas tree for Danielle Marie Maier to make her bridal entrance from the hotel lobby, which was decorated with life-size gold toy soldiers, loads of wreaths and garlands and a gigantic gingerbread house.
“We go hard here,” said Emilie Elias, a weddings sales manager at the hotel. Two interior designers, Anthony Sierra and Ty Cundey of GailGray Home Furnishings and Design in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, began decorating Nov. 1., spending more than 1,000 hours over the course of three weeks. The hotel has 31 Christmas trees.
Maier, who is from the Poconos, grew up visiting Bethlehem with her grandmother. She frequented the Christkindlmarkt, a Christmas-themed market where vendors sell ornaments, gifts and snacks, and the city's ice skating rink. For her wedding, she knew she wanted a winter wonderland theme, but Mullen was not up for it.
He eventually changed his mind when the couple toured the hotel in October 2022 and saw photos from previous seasonal weddings at the hotel, with the backdrop of the decorated trees and lit up wreaths.
“I've always loved Christmas,” said Mullen, 29, a senior analyst at KBRA Analytics, a credit-rating agency. “The joy and the overall attitude of everyone is more uplifting and positive.”
So, for him, it only made sense to capitalize on that joy for their wedding — the sentiment of happiness and celebration is amplified by the Christmas spirit.
Initially, Mullen and Meier, who live in Telford, Pennsylvania, had been planning on having a fall wedding, but they changed their date upon visiting the hotel. Maier, 28, a biotechnician at the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., said that the typical summer and fall wedding felt “plain” in comparison. “Christmas brings life to everything,” she said.
“While the months are colder, it still feels warmer,” Mullen added.
And the hotel's holiday flourishes are not gaudy, nor kitschy, Maier said. The couple, who snagged a date in October 2022, wanted an “elegant, vintage winter wonderland feel.”
In December, Historic Hotel Bethlehem is booked and busy with 18 weddings. December weddings start at $18,000 and go up to $25,000, and they tend to share a common aesthetic: gingerbread wedding cakes and blue and white stained glass Moravian Christmas stars.
Some couples bring in their own Christmas tree, and in lieu of a traditional guest book, they asked each guest to sign an ornament and hang it on the tree. Other couples distribute Christmas cookies to guests as a party favor. For one wedding, the bride's mother constructed place cards with Christmas cards from family and friends that she had collected over decades.
“Many of the couples that get married here have rich family Christmas traditions, and they like to share them around this time of the year,” said Elias, the weddings sales manager.
“It's just that magical Christmas experience,” she added.
Elias had her own Christmas wedding at the hotel in 2019, and she loved it so much that she decided she wanted to work at the hotel and help couples plan their winter wonderland celebrations. “You walk in here and it just hits you in the face,” she said. “We have a signature scent here that people always ask me about, and it smells like Christmas.”
And the bonus? “They decorate — they do it all,” said Amy Marshall, who got married to Patrick Clancey at the hotel on Dec. 16. The hotel's elaborate seasonal bedazzlement is inherently included in wedding packages. “I'm very practical.”
Historic Hotel Bethlehem opened in 1922, but the hotel building was built in 1741 as a log cabin, when Moravians from Germany settled in the town. On Christmas Eve that year, they named the town Bethlehem. Since then, Christmas has been central to the city's identity.
Marshall, 48, a private practice nurse practitioner, was excited to show off the Christmas town to the couples' families. “It's like you're stuck in a snow globe,” she said. “It's just like this perfect little bubble.”
Marshall added that weddings during Christmastime “kill two birds with one stone. We get to see the family during the holiday time.” Clancey, 61, an independent business coach who recently moved to Plainfield Township, Pennsylvania, from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, hadn't seen his entire family for the holidays in years. “So this was a nice way to be able to do that,” Marshall said.
On their wedding night, the couple rode on a horsedrawn carriage, with a sleigh attached to it, to Moravian University for their ceremony. Afterward, they took the sleigh to City Hall for photos in front of the town's Christmas tree, and they then returned to the hotel for the cocktail hour and reception. Their flower girls, Marshall's two nieces, who were dressed in burgundy dresses with silver bows and shoes, joined the couple for a sleigh ride.
On the day after their wedding, the couple and 41 of their guests dined at the hotel's weekly “Brunch with Santa,” which features a pianist performing Christmas tunes. The couple plan on going to New York for their honeymoon to visit the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and attend a Lauren Daigle Christmas concert at the Beacon Theater.
“There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm,” Clancey said about his guests' responses upon finding out about the wedding theme. The couple kept a small guest list of 52, and they couldn't invite all their friends. “We've had people banging on the door, asking, `Can we come, can we come, can we come?'”