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There will be no stretch limo waiting outside the church at Chrissy Harris and Nathan Johnson’s wedding. Instead, they’ll drive to their reception in Harris’ 2007 Mazda — white, to match her dress.

Appetizers have replaced a sit-down dinner. Candles will decorate the church instead of flowers. Harris’ off-the-rack wedding dress cost $700 — the same as her mother’s dress decades earlier. And the reception will be at Grand Prairie’s city-owned Ruthe Jackson Center, where two ballrooms for the couple’s Saturday night wedding in June will cost just $880.

“We’re trying to watch every quarter,” said Harris, a student teacher in Grand Prairie.

What won’t be cut is the guest list, which has grown to 575 from 300.

“I’d rather have my close family and friends with me than a big extravagant event,” said Harris, whose fiance is a youth minister. “Are my guests going to remember the food they had or the time they spent with us at this event?”

Harris and Johnson are hardly alone in their quest to pinch wedding dollars. As the recession continues, local couples are shifting priorities away from more lavish extremes to practical planning, as well as rolling up their sleeves to do some of the wedding preparations themselves, say wedding planners and vendors.

“Overall, brides are really concentrating on getting value for their dollars and assessing what’s most important to them,” said Cheryl Allgood, certified wedding planner at the Ruthe Jackson Center.

The Top Ten trends of 2009 by The Knot, a leading wedding Web site, reflect a more frugal bride.

“The current economic climate isn’t stopping couples from celebrating,” Carley Roney, co-founder and editor in chief of The Knot, said in a statement. “Brides are still planning glamorous weddings — but they are being very smart about how they spend every penny. Many of the year’s top trends reflect new, chic ways to save on your wedding.”

The average cost of a wedding is expected to go down slightly this year nationally to $20,398 after dropping 24 percent last year, according to The Wedding Report, an industry research group based in Tucson, Ariz.

Last year saw a major shift in spending priorities from 2007, with couples spending more than 30 percent less on such wedding staples as the bride’s dress, invitations, cake, bridesmaid bouquets and engagement rings, according to the report. Reception food took the biggest hit—falling by more than 50 percent last year.

The average cost of a wedding in the Dallas-Fort Worth area has also fallen in the past couple of years, but at $26,925 is still considerably higher than the national average, according to the report. The wedding industry is still a big market force, as 53,000 local weddings are expected to yield $2.3 billion this year to the marketplace.

Despite the higher costs spent locally, wedding planners are seeing couples becoming more practical in their spending.

“We had a wedding last Friday where the bride and groom were here at noon and did all their own decorations,” said Jennifer Weber, director of special events at the YWCA in downtown Fort Worth.

While Weber said she hasn’t seen a drop in bookings, more have shifted to events during the week, likely for the cost savings. Booking the YWCA on Monday through Thursday costs $1,000, less than half the cost of a Saturday event. (Profits from renting the historic hall go to the YWCA’s programs for homeless women and children.)

Even couples with higher wedding budgets are shifting to lower-cost options. Booking inquiries at the Gaylord Texan Resort in Grapevine are running close to what they were last year, at about a dozen a day, but are often for fewer guests, said Martha Neibling, spokeswoman for the resort.

“More leads are for smaller weddings of 75 or less than large weddings,” Neibling said.

Shifting to a day event at the Gaylord Texan can also lead to substantial savings: Evening events including food and beverage average cost about $100 per guest, while day events cut that cost by 25 percent, Neibling said.

Harris recommends that brides consider a wedding planner to help manage a wedding budget.

“A wedding planner helped show us where we could cut corners and where we didn’t need to,” she said. “She also gave us different options to allow us to stay in budget.”