First Things First -
People get carried away with the imagined day that they often have no idea where to begin to make the dream a reality. I was the same way. When my husband proposed he wasn�t even able to draw a breath after asking before I said �yes�. It was wonderful to be engaged but after about a week it sank in, I have to plan a wedding.
What the heck did I know about weddings? Not a darn thing. I wasn�t one of those girls who had dreamed all her life abut her wedding. I can�t recall a single memory of my childhood where I even considered the idea of a wedding unless it revolved around my dolls and they came with everything you needed. So, I did the most logical thing I could, I bought bridal magazines and read them at work. I was lucky in that my job offered me lots of reading time and no restrictions on reading material. As I mentioned before, these magazines can cause your head to spin and that�s exactly what happened to me. All the pretty pictures, all the options for what a wedding could or should look like, and those magazines are almost all ads (Buy me! Hire me!). I was inundated with so much information I had a hard time sifting through it all to pick out the bits that would really help me. This was when I realized I needed to figure out what I wanted and what my fianc� wanted, not what the magazines told me I should want.
When you get engaged people immediately start asking about your wedding plans as if everything were already planned and you just had to pull it out of a box and magically it was done. It got to be annoying after a little while, it was like they were reminding me of all the things I hadn�t done yet. Everyone wants to see the picture in your mind, but if you�re like me, and didn�t have one it got to be a little uncomfortable. I decided to narrow my focus of the planning to basics and that�s when I came up with my first official bit of planning advice. Don't think about the big picture yet, keep it small and it will stay realistic in your mind. It works.
Tip #1 - Pick one or two things you want to focus on for your wedding.
For instance, I started my planning with the ceremony. People would ask if I was going to have a church wedding and with out any hesitation my mouth would open up and I�d say, �No�. So, I knew one thing, no churches for me. I talked to my fianc� and he also agreed he couldn�t imagine himself in a church wedding. That lead me down a different bend in the planning path and I began to look into alternative ceremony locations. Hotels, restaurants, beaches, parks, coves, mountains, gardens, etc. It�s amazing the options that are out there, I even considered museums. And thus another piece of advice came to mind . . .
Tip #2 - Broaden your mind and you may find a unique place to have your wedding.
From the choice to not have a church wedding I realized that I didn�t want the traditional ceremony either. So, I set to work researching wedding ceremonies from all walks of life. I read Christian ceremonies, Catholic, Jewish, Non-denominational, even Hand Fasting ceremonies. My fianc� and I talked about what we felt we wanted to say in our ceremony. We wanted it to be clear that we were the ones making this choice, no one was being given away, we were both giving our selves to each other. I ended up writing an original ceremony based on the structure of the Hand Fasting ceremonies that I found in my research. They seemed to flow better and were more adaptable to what we wanted to say and to what we didn�t want to say. I worked hard to make the ceremony universal, so everyone of all faiths could enjoy it.
What follows on the next page is the ceremony I wrote, feel free to take it and make it your own. |
