Evelyne Ekdahl

Most celebrant sites claim to be good at the job. Evelyne Ekdahl has a jury saying so, twice, and the jury publishes what it actually checked. In 2020 and again in 2022 she was awarded the maximum rating from Wedding Award Switzerland, 15 golden ribbons, an award ceremony held on 15 October 2022 at the Barfüsserkirche in Basel. Her own site quotes the award's own explanation of what 15 ribbons are supposed to certify: strong client care, an excellent qualification, excellent marketing, excellent infrastructure, a jury examination, an innovative selling point, and a consistently high standard across social media and the website itself. That is a more specific claim than "award-winning celebrant," and it is one a couple can go and check against the award's own site rather than take on faith.

The more useful check, though, sits on her own Referenzen page. 21 of the testimonials there carry a couple's name followed by the venue where the ceremony actually happened: a lakeside restaurant in Stäfa (for 2 different couples), a hillside villa on the Brissago islands, Schloss Hünigen, the Schatzalp above Davos, a garden centre in Lucerne, a mountain resort at Melchsee-Frutt, Schloss Rapperswil, and one wedding at a villa in Italy. One couple, Moni and Tim, married in a drive-in cinema, the Oslo-Studios in Basel, on 24 April 2021. Another, Andrea and Christoph, held their ceremony at the Blüemlismatt in Egerkingen on 31 August 2018, a year after Ekdahl trained for the work, which puts a real date on how long she has actually been doing this rather than a vague "years of experience" line.

She did not come to this from theology or theatre. Her own background is in advertising, communication, marketing and sales, running specialist and leadership roles for various company brands before she made the switch. The switch was personal before it was professional: in 2011 she married her own partner, Thaddeus, in a freie Trauung at the Vierwaldstättersee, and the couple went on to have 2 sons. She trained properly in 2017, through a course at zeremonien-akademie.ch, a 2-day intensive one-to-one coaching with experienced celebrants, and a separate rhetoric coaching course with speaking coach Michael Oefner. The business name, Liebesfeuerwerk, is explained on her own About page as a deliberate compound: love, fire, a work of love built for the ceremony, and a little fireworks in the stomach, which is exactly the kind of detail that would sound cute from anyone else and reads as consistent from someone who has built an entire practice around it.

She did not stop at winning the award either. In February 2021 she co-founded the Berufsverband Schweizerischer ZeremonienleiterInnen, a professional association for Swiss ceremony leaders, together with Philipp Erne of Lifeconversion; 3 more celebrants, Simone Gori, Sandra Vetsch-Bischofberger and Esther Cossalter, joined the founding board, a 5-person group that went public in August 2021. In 2023 she founded a separate training operation, the Talentschmiede für Zeremonien, offering a certification course toward becoming a "Zertifizierter Trauredner" or "Zertifizierte Traurednerin." She also coaches other celebrants directly, one to one, for CHF 140 an hour, usually in the Zug area or online. None of that is required reading for a couple hiring her for their own wedding, but it says something a testimonial can't: other people in this business, not just brides and grooms, treat her as someone worth learning from.

The actual booking process runs in 5 steps, laid out on her own site with real timings rather than vague stages. The first is a free, no-obligation getting-to-know-you meeting, usually held in person in the Zug area and lasting about an hour. The second, roughly 2 to 3 months before the wedding, is a longer planning and preparation conversation, usually at the couple's own home, running about 4 hours and focused on their story rather than logistics. Between that meeting and the wedding she writes the speech and contacts everyone else involved in the ceremony directly, the Tätschmeister (the Swiss term for a wedding's master of ceremonies) and any musicians, to sort out the practical handoffs. On the day itself she arrives early, does a soundcheck, and checks in with the musicians and Tätschmeister before the guests arrive. A few weeks after the wedding she follows up to see how the couple is doing. Across an average wedding she says she puts in at least 30 to 35 hours, a figure that covers a lot more than the roughly 45 to 60 minutes the ceremony itself runs.

Rituals are offered rather than imposed. Her site names a sand ceremony, a light ceremony, rituals drawn from other cultures, or something built entirely from scratch for the couple, and Andrea and Christoph's own testimonial confirms she takes a couple's preferences seriously in the other direction too: they specifically did not want anything esoteric or religious in their ceremony, and Ekdahl, in their words, met that wish completely. At the end of the ceremony couples receive a certificate for the freie Hochzeitszeremonie, a keepsake rather than a legal document.

What "in English" actually means here

Her website itself is German only. There is no language toggle in the navigation and no English page anywhere on the site, including in its own sitemap, so anyone corresponding with her by email or filling in the contact form should expect German unless they ask otherwise. That much matches the general shape a foreign couple should plan around.

What her site does not do, though, is limit the ceremony itself to German. Her FAQ states directly that she offers complete ceremonies in Swiss German, standard German, and English, with shorter passages or greetings available in other languages, French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese or Serbian, with a little help from the couple. That is not marketing language standing alone: Sonya and Silvan, whose ceremony ran at the Giardino Lago in Ascona, wrote on her own Referenzen page that "Evelyne did the whole ceremony in English. It was her first and she did it with such brilliance." A couple planning a fully English-language ceremony is not asking her to improvise outside her stated range, and they are not her first.

How far she'll actually travel

Her site frames travel as a non-issue rather than a limitation: whether the wedding is in Switzerland or abroad, she says she will go wherever the couple chooses. The Referenzen page backs that up with a real example rather than just the claim, a wedding at a villa in Italy. Weddings abroad get an individual quote once the details are discussed, with a stated rule of thumb for the extra cost: travel expenses plus 1 night's accommodation the evening before. Inside Switzerland, by contrast, the price is flat and the travel is already built in.

What she publishes about price

CHF 2'600 buys a complete freie Hochzeitszeremonie in Switzerland, and the fee page is explicit that this covers every cost for a Swiss ceremony including all travel expenses; the only stated add-on is the cost of physical props a specific ritual might need. She publishes 2 adjacent prices for other ceremony types on the same site, which is useful context even though this listing is about weddings specifically: CHF 2'100 for renewing wedding vows, and CHF 1'500 for a Willkommensfeier, a non-religious welcome ceremony or naming for a child, both flat rates with Swiss travel costs included. None of the 3 prices is described as a floor, a starting point, or subject to a package tier, which puts her ahead of most suppliers in this category on the one thing couples usually can't find out until they ask directly.

The legal question, on her own FAQ

Ekdahl's own FAQ takes on the legal question directly, under the heading "Ist eine freie Trauung rechtskräftig in der Schweiz?" Her answer names the standesamtliche Trauung as the ceremony that carries legal weight in Switzerland, then states in the same breath that a freie Trauung "ist nicht rechtskräftig und hat einen symbolischen Charakter," not legally binding, and symbolic in character. That is accurate, and worth stating precisely rather than loosely: a marriage only becomes legally binding in Switzerland once a civil registrar has performed it, at a place the canton has signed off on, and Ekdahl's own ceremonies meet neither condition. She never uses the word "marries" anywhere on her own site, and this listing won't either. What she runs is the ceremony a couple layers onto that separate legal act, not a substitute for it, and her own FAQ says exactly that rather than leaving a couple to guess.

Between the award, the venue list and the direct, correctly worded FAQ, this is a celebrant whose claims are unusually easy to check against her own site rather than take at face value, and every one that was checked here held up. The gap worth knowing before writing to her is the language of the site itself, not the ceremony: expect to plan the correspondence in German even for a wedding she'll run entirely in English.