Gonna get married! Not me... but, instead... two of our favorite readers!
Today's blog is dedicated to all things wedding related! It is in honor of Tera and Treye - two loyal readers who are getting hitched on Saturday. I wish I could say they met through highlowaha.com and, after having a whirlwind romance, decided to tie the knot. But, I can't. This fated couple met well before my inaugural post last February.
A little about them...
Tera is a go-getter and impressed me from the start. She initiated a lunch meeting with me only days after our first introduction. I think she thought she was going to "talk me into" letting her do an internship in my office. Little did she know, I was in hot pursuit of her and that I wouldn't have let her slip away without first getting to work with her in some capacity. Yet another example of what a skilled talent scout I am! Treye was immediately elevated to "keeper" status when he showed up at my house in Louisville one day, ready to help Tera construct forty-one intricate centerpieces (they were boardwalks made out of Popsicle sticks and all kinds of other nautical looking materials). The only other man I know willing to engage in such craziness is my husband who nine years earlier got suckered into making centerpieces for a regional conference I was co-chairing. Call it the litmus test, but it hasn't failed me yet!
Now for today's topic...
The way I see it... we have all either poured over Martha Stewart Wedding magazines, attended a wedding, served as an attendant, or gotten married (for some, maybe even more than once). Our cumulative and mass exposure to weddings all over the country - from farm weddings to swank black tie affairs; from intimate gatherings of 15 to invitations lists topping 800; from simple five minute ceremonies to elaborate ceremonies of every cultural tradition - makes us as close to experts on the topic as anyone else.
So today, we will feature the best of the best wedding stories. I'm not talking about wedding bloopers or horror stories. That is completely overdone and besides, we don't want to take a chance that residual bad karma will muck things up for Tera and Treye.
Instead, today we will feature creative and memorable moments from your wedding... or the wedding of someone you know.
I'll go first. I was excited about two things I coordinated for my wedding.
Friendship Plates: I had all my girlfriends fly in for my wedding a day early, so that I could host them for an afternoon of Paint Your Pottery. Each friend painted me one dessert plate (are you surprised?). The one criteria I gave them was that the plate should somehow represent an element of our friendship. It could commemorate a specific event, something we had in common, or a friendship ritual we shared. I spent the next year searching for individual dinner plates to match the work of each friend. My ultimate dream... not yet realized... is to host an Annual Friendship Dinner, using all 13 settings, and honoring a different friend each year. In the meantime, I use the them liberally and I love them. There's never a time I use the plates that I don't get to talk about the people who made them.
Time Capsule: We got married in November 1999, the year the world was freaking out about Y2K and whether or not planet earth would stop turning on it's axis at exactly 12:01 a.m. I read newspaper headline after newspaper headline of grave predictions and I just couldn't help but think (remember, I was a history major and I love data) how much fun it would be to look at these things years from now.
So, I decided to seal a time capsule at my wedding to be opened in 2024 (at our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary) . Each table was host to a different topic (politics, fashion, popular culture, etc...) and each person at each table had their own Prediction Card. On one side of the card, they were to answer a set of five questions (will a woman be president, cost of a loaf of bread, if currency would still be paper, and two more) and make their own prediction around the topic at their table. On the other side of the card, guests were to write us a note to be read in twenty-five years. We gathered everyone in the reception hall later in the night and formally sealed the capsule. Now the capsule sits tightly sealed inside a chest in our living room. Other fun things we put in the capsule... small photo albums with pictures representing our typical day, Polaroid pictures of all our guests, favorite items, letters to one another, my father's Father-of-the-Bride-Speech, and things I can't remember, but that I am sure I'll be ready to reconnect with in sixteen years!
Now it's your turn. What are some of the fun and creative ideas you've seen implemented at weddings? I've been to some of your weddings and I know for a fact there are enough creative ideas to post from now until I return on Friday. So don't be shy or modest. Julie, I am also excited to hear the creative idea you recently saw that helped to inspire today's topic.
Signing off until tomorrow...
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