Our wedding, detailed

As a follow-up to my thoughts on weddings, I’ve described the wedding that JG and I put together over when we got married over two years ago. At the end of the day, I was happy because I was married, no one got sick or fell over from the heat, and everyone liked the food. The quick version is that we got married on the hottest day in June that year, I wore a dress from J. Crew, we ate barbecue chicken and strawberry shortcake, there was no dancing, and we took off in JG’s beat-up Subaru before leaving for a cruise to the Bahamas. We opted to have a casual wedding so that we could invite all of our friends. It wasn’t a fancy affair, but it was just right for us. I still gaze lovingly at my wedding dress and flip through the pictures fondly.

The (much) long(er) version is after the jump…

Budget
My parents were extremely generous and provided a set amount of money for me to budget as I pleased for the wedding. If I wanted to spend more than that, it would come out of my pocket; if I spent less than that, I could keep the change, so to speak. With that in mind, JG and I lowered the budget line so that we could put some of the wedding money toward our future down payment on a house. As a result, we did not have too much money to spend. I believe that our entire wedding budget was the same cost as a designer wedding dress for one of my co-workers. As with any wedding, our financial resources were a huge part of the decision-making process for all of our choices. I like to think that we were forced to be appropriately frugal, and our budget helped keep our priorities straight. We had to constantly ask ourselves, “What is more important?”

Location and Time
Our wedding took place on June 25, 2005, at our church in the Pennsylvania countryside. We love our church, and it had the bonus of being practically free. The building doesn’t have an actual sanctuary, so the ceremony was outside on the lawn at noon. My mom wouldn’t let me go any earlier for the sake of the guests, but I later thanked her for that. We had a buffet lunch reception inside the church immediately following the ceremony. JG and I left for our apartment around 4pm. It was short and sweet.

Theme
I hesitate to call our wedding “themed,” but we incorporated the figure eight knot into our invitations, programs, table numbers, the photo mat people signed as a guest book, and even our farewell bubbles at the end. I explained the significance in the program:

The knot that you see today is called a figure eight knot, the most important knot in rock climbing. It is used to tie a climber’s harness to his rope, which his partner, the belayer, controls to help protect him in case of a fall. Properly tied, it will not fail under a heavy load; the knot becomes even tighter as tension is applied, often making it difficult to untie.

The figure eight knot holds special significance to JG and RA besides being part of one of their favorite hobbies. The knot’s resemblance to the infinity symbol, its role in the climber-belayer partnership, and its tendency to become tighter under stress all contribute to why they have chosen to feature it at today’s celebration of their marriage.

The color scheme included a lot of leafy green and accents of light yellow.

Wardrobe
Me: My dress was from J. Crew, although it was much less expensive than it is now. I showed my mom the dress online shortly after I got engaged, and she figured that we could always send it back if I didn’t like it. I loved it when it arrived at my dorm room, and we just got it hemmed over Christmas break that year. I wore silver flip-flops and pearl earrings (a gift from JG). I wanted my hair to be half-up, but the 90-degree heat decreed that my black hair had to be completely up. I really liked the nape-of-the-neck style, and the stylist added pearl accents. I was totally comfortable, and I still use everything from that day, with the exception of the dress. I have a vague idea that I could get it altered to tea length and dyed a different color, but I’m not sure how to go about doing that.

Bridesmaids: The girls’ dresses were also from J. Crew, but that specific style is no longer available. I was bound and determined to get dresses that they could use again and were not overly expensive, and it was a long, hard struggle. I couldn’t ask my bridesmaids to pay up to $300 for a flimsy dress that not even I liked. For months, I went online everyday to check the price of my dresses of choice until they went on sale (about $100), and I immediately called my bridesmaids in a frenzy to order them. They each snapped up their dresses, and I am so relieved that they have all worn them for other occasions. I gave the girls pearl earrings to wear that day, but I didn’t care what they did with their hair or what their shoes looked like, and no one noticed at all.

[Side note about J. Crew: I e-mailed their customer service department to say thank you for their help in sending fabric swatches and to tell them that everyone loved the dresses, and they wrote back and asked me for a picture so they could add us to their Wedding Wall! I'm not sure why, but I love that a picture of us is posted somewhere at J. Crew.]

JG and the groomsmen: I requested that the men wear black suits of their choice with white shirts, mostly because our wedding was too casual for tuxes. Also, I hated the idea of renting a piece of clothing, and I believed that every guy needed a black suit in general, so I didn’t feel guilty asking someone to buy even a cheap black suit from somewhere. I managed to find green ties (50% off!) that were a close-enough match to the bridesmaid dresses. Despite differing styles of suits — one even had gold pinstripes — the overall effect of the black suit, white shirt, and green tie made everything seem cohesive, and it was just right. Again, no one realized that everything wasn’t the same.

Flowers
I gave my florist my budget and color scheme, described the formality of the event, and let her go. She did a great job, and I had no complaints with her choices. I was more comfortable delegating the flower decisions than taking care of them myself. We used two potted lily-like plants for the ceremony, one of which is still flourishing in our house. My bouquet and JG’s boutonniere had white lisanthus with lemon leaves, and all of the other personal flowers were butter-yellow combinations of lisanthus, freesia, and garden roses. Our centerpieces were potted mums (much cheaper than cut arrangements) in white, yellow, and lavender. They ended up being a little too tall for people to see across the table, but there was nothing I could have done about it on the day of the wedding. We marked one chair at each table as the “lucky winner” who got to take home the centerpiece, and I’m so glad that we had no trouble getting rid of them.

Photography
Finding a photographer was the hardest part of the wedding planning process because I didn’t want a wedding album. My mother-in-law had offered her amazing scrapbooking skills for our album, so my goal was to find a photographer who would simply deliver us digital files and the rights to reproduce them. I didn’t want a giant wedding portrait or an engagement session. Just pictures. The fact that we were getting married in June didn’t help because our bare-bones request couldn’t compete with other couples who wanted The Works. Ultimately, we went with Cachelle Ink Studios, a local group of photographers, who delivered exactly what I wanted. If we need to, we can still make prints from the CDs we received. I really love the scrapbook that JG’s mom made for us, and I’m trying to persuade her that brides would love to buy a “customized, unique, handcrafted memory book,” but she has yet to believe me and start up a side business.

Ceremony
Everyone walked in to the ceremony as one of our friends played Pachabel’s Canon in D on a keyboard. JG still calls it “our wedding song.” My dad and I had to walk up a slight hill to get to the chairs, and JG told me later that he loved seeing me come up slowly into view. JG’s sister did a reading for us (Genesis 2:19-24), and a couple who had mentored us as we were dating spoke directly to us. Their “charge” to us, as they called it, was really personal and moving; it wasn’t fluffy or sentimental, just convicting and honest. JG and I said our vows, exchanged rings, and kissed. I have to note that as I just stood there grinning, JG cried happily though the whole thing, which made every other woman cry along with him. It was all very simple, lovely, and over in twenty minutes. People told us afterward that the ceremony was their favorite part of the wedding, and that really warmed my heart because that it was the most important part of the day to me.

Reception
One of our priorities was to be able to invite as many people as we wanted to the wedding. Invitations included “and family” so that people could choose whether or not to bring their children; all of our college-age and older friends who were single got an “and guest” line on their invitations. A lot of our friends didn’t take us up on it because their friends were invited, too, but we wanted people to have the option. With that type of open-door invitation policy, we had to scale down our food selection, so I chose a picnic-style buffet of barbecue chicken, pulled pork sandwiches, vegetarian lasagna, garden salad, potato salad, chips, and pretzels, with lemonade and iced tea on the side. I know that the food wasn’t very wedding-esque, but it was darn tasty. I don’t love that we had to go with disposable dinnerware and sit on folding chairs, but since it was more important to us to include our friends, I shrugged it off. I like to think that our casual event was refreshing, but maybe people were scandalized by the cheapness. Who knows? Or, more importantly, who cares?

JG and I cut into our delicious strawberry shortcake wedding cake, and I stood on a chair so that I could be on the same level for any potential cake smashing. I dreaded getting cake all over me (“Watch the dress!”), but JG was civil enough, despite the “encouragement” from his friends. While everyone ate cake, we watched a slide show that I had put together with pictures from when the two of us were children, dating, and engaged. JG helped choose some of our favorite songs to play in the background, and even if it was really cheesy, I think people enjoyed it.

Our friends waved us off in a cloud of bubbles, and JG and I jumped into his Subaru station wagon that was packed to the gills with presents and balloons. I would have felt stupid wasting money on a car and a driver to drive us the twelve miles back to our apartment, and I rather enjoyed driving off in our own car, beat-up as it was.

Honeymoon
Thanks to the generosity of JG’s parents, we left for a 5-day/4-night cruise to the Bahamas the Monday after the wedding. I highly recommend building in a resting day after the wedding to recuperate and prep for the honeymoon; I can’t imagine having to leave for the airport (or wherever) straight from the reception or even the next morning. Packing for the trip was on my list of things to do, but I just ran out of time.

I was dubious about how much I would like a cruise, but it turned out to be the perfect balance between JG’s need to lie around and my inclination to have a full-to-bursting vacation itinerary. Best of all, after ten months of endless planning, I didn’t have to do anything! We did some of the cruise activities (swing dancing, rock climbing competition that we won, dueling pianos performance) and went on a couple of excursions, but most of the time, we just relaxed. JG and I were seated with a fun, equally-newlywed couple for our dinners, so we had a great time eating yummy food and comparing wedding notes with them. We still send them Christmas and anniversary cards. It was the best vacation I had ever had, and I was so glad that I got to spend it with my newly-minted husband.

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