It may be your day to be a princess, but donning a rhinestone tiara is not required.  Handcrafted headpieces from Jennifer Behr are glamorous alternatives featuring silk camellias, orchids, feathers, or diamonds that are more avant garde than cheesy.  Since the headpieces have been spotted on the likes of Natalie Portman and featured in Gossip Girl, you can safely splurge on these wedding accessories knowing that you’ll likely sport the look again – which is more than you can say for the typical bridal crown. 

Tired of registries filled with practical mainstays owned by every newlywed in town?  Tailor your wish list to your personal style.

The Do Gooder
Do your heart some good by creating a wedding gift registry with a more altruistic bent. 

Where to Find: featuring more than one million charities from which to choose, JustGive.org is a non-profit website that lets couples build a wedding registry directed to their favorite causes.

The Luxe Lover
Bedding is a registry staple, but this is your chance to sink those pedicured toes into the Mercedes of linens.  Get sumptuous threads that feel delicious on your skin and last forever.

Where to Find:  Down to Basics (downtobasics.com) offers a specialty registry for high-quality, high thread count linens from lines such as Ann Gish and Sferra.  They also have a storefront on Newbury Street in Boston. 

The Risk Taker
You met your fiancé while running a class V rapid and feel incomplete without your backpack.  With such an affinity for the outdoors, why place house with your registry?  Instead, ask for all those outdoor toys you’ve both been dreaming of. 

Where to Find: Outdoor retailers such as REI (rei.com) offer gift registries conspicuously absent of china, linen and crystal. 

The pomegranate may have enjoyed recent reign as the cocktail flav du jour, but the pear may just take over thanks to the release of two pearl-flavored vodkas: Absolut Pears and Grey Goose La Poire.  Paul Westerkamp, beverage director of Boston’s swanky 33 Restaurant & Lounge, thinks the pear will prove to be more than just the latest in a long line of flavored vodkas because of its place in our collective past.  Pomegranates may be novel, but who hasn’t had a pear?

“Like the apple, the pear brings back comforting thoughts of Americana,” says Westerkamp, who added a seasonal cocktail using the new liquors to his menu in September.  “People respond to flavors like that.”

Pear and Apple Tart
Show your guests that you’re a bona fide cocktail queen by serving up this signature pear drink from Westerkamp to start your wedding reception.You may want to conduct a few taste tests to see how the pear’s crisp mellow sweetness mixes with faves like martinis and mojitos.  Ah, the hardship…

We just hope the Pomegranate doesn’t take it too hard.

• 2 parts Grey Goose La Poire or Absolut Pears
• 2 parts sweet and sour mix
• 1 part apple liqueur
• Splash of lime juice

Shake and strain into chilled martini glass.  Dust rim with mixture of cinnamon, sugar, and allspice.  Garnish with pear slice.

When the time for wedding toasts rolls around, consider swapping basic champagne for shots of chilled limoncello. The liqueur made from fermented Sorrento lemons was invented on the coast of southern Italy more than 100 years ago and is traditionally served chilled as an after-dinner digestive. The sweet, lemony beverage has gained recent popularity in America due to celebrity endorsements from the likes of Danny DeVito, George Clooney and Avril Lavigne.  Restaurants this side of the Atlantic have recently begun offering it on cocktail and dessert menus because of its refreshing lemon flavor that lacks the bitterness of actual lemon juice.

Modern-day brides are the past’s fabled princesses, reincarnated with fab stilettos and PDAs, of course. And as such, they deserve a stylish tent to fit their outdoor wedding fairy tale.  Raj Tents, a diamond in the white vinyl rough, offers snazzy ways to escape the elements at your wedding reception. Their collection of luxury canopies is handcrafted in India with the highest quality cotton.  Sultry color combinations come to life with exotic embroidery and woodblock printing, an ancient East Asian technique.  Carved wooden chairs, silk cushions, and glowing lanterns add the finishing touches that will transform an ordinary space into a scene from Arabian Nights.