Wedding Graduate: Michelle And The (Hot) Traditional Social Hall Wedding

Recently, I noticed that we didn't have a lot (any?) weddings on the site of the church-hall-reception variety. And by church hall, I don't necessarily mean *church* hall (though that's one of the kinds of weddings I grew up with), but I mean public hall. Maybe it's in a shul, maybe it's in a YMCA, maybe it's the-hall-everyone-rents-in-your-town. The thing about these halls is A) They are usually pretty affordable B) You don't have to deal with Wedding People C) Almost everyone who doesn't live in a big city has access to one, and D) They are pretty... boring inside. But I had FULL faith that if anyone could pull off a stylish-as-hell wedding in a public social hall, it was you guys. So not a week after me lamenting this, Michelle emailed me her wedding. I was so sucked in to Michelle's wedding sass (that's a proper use of the word, just wait), and wedding hotness, that it took me a while to realize - the reception was in a public social hall. So here we go. And I'm not above admitting that when I got to the end of reading what Michelle wrote, I was a full on teary mess. Because yes, this is exactly it.
My planning process went something like this: A) add every and all wedding blogs to Reader, B) obsess over said blogs, start to second guess all my ideas and think that this totally awesome wedding I'm planning is stupid, dumb, and will in no way look or be anything like these gorgeous events, C) have an emotional breakdown followed by the realization that my wedding is about the start of a marriage, NOT about favors and mason jars and shoes.I'm not going to sugar coat it, the ten months of planning was horribly stressful. Adam (my lovely groom) and I fought a lot. I cried a lot. I proceeded to immediately unsubscribe from any blog that made me feel inferior, crazy, self-conscious, or dumb. This is an important piece of advice to all engaged ladies: those feelings are not what wedding planning is about. If you have them, please promise me, go right now and take a good hard look at all wedding media you are digesting and make a strong choice to not be a part of anything that makes you feel bad.Case in point, my wedding invites: Half-way through my quest to be the craftiest, budgetiest, most DIY bride of all time (stupid blogs getting inside my brain), my Gocco broke, leaving me with half printed invites. As I cried for three hours and Adam proclaimed that he didn't know who I was anymore, I faced the fact that I was heading down a crazy bride person path where I felt stressed out and sad. I wanted to feel fun and carefree. I threw out all the half finished invites, had everything printed at a local print shop, overshot my invite budget by half, and in the end, all my guests loved them. They didn't care, OR EVEN WOULD HAVE NOTICED, if they were Gocco'd, or thermographied, or letter pressed, or made out of gold, or written in blood. It just wasn't as important as I thought it would be.One thing that grounded us through this whole process was our required marriage counseling through my childhood pastor who was performing our ceremony. Even if you are not religious and don't have a required number of sessions to go to, pretty please search out a marriage counselor and go to a few pre-wedding appointments. Of course, we are always going to have the same underlining issues throughout our marriage, but during the stress of planning, it was a huge help to be able to vocalize and work through our problems before the wedding. It brought us together, we learned a lot from each other, and it gave us a foundation to start our marriage on.I was surprised that my wedding day turned out to be the best day of my life to date. I knew if was going to be great, but I could have never imagined the love and support that I felt that day. It was full of tears, hugs, laughs, cake, ice cream sundaes, candy, friends, family, and dancing. It didn't matter how much my dress cost, or that there was no ring bearer/flower girl, or that I made my own bouquets from grocery store flowers. No one cared that we didn't serve lobster or filet mignon and had a wine and beer only bar. Not one person noticed the lack of out-of-town bags or limousines. Our guests DID rave about our personal, sweet ceremony. They loved the $10 vintage applique I put on the back on my dress. Everyone laughed when my mom made a few jokes during our ceremony and there were tears when my dad and I danced.Remember a few things:

• When things go wrong on your wedding day, don't let it ruin your experience. If you go into it knowing that something is likely to go all wackadoodle, you'll be fine. I spent hours making these super cute little containers filled with confetti for our grand exit from the church. Then, mother nature said f*ck your confetti and proceeded to rain all day long. I cared for about .2 nanoseconds before remembering that it wasn't going to make me sad on my special day.
• Bribe a friend to be a day of coordinator. Mine saved my sanity.
• Yes, wedding nights are typically for sex, but if you party all day as hard and as fun as we did, good luck with that.
• Your wedding is YOUR (and your partner's) wedding. It is not your Aunt's wedding, it is not your Grandmother's weddings, and it is not your In-law's wedding. Stick to your guns about what you want and what will make you happy. If you need a longer than normal cocktail hour for pictures, then do it. If you want to wear a dress off of the mother of the bride section at David's Bridal, then do it. If you want an ice cream sundae buffet, by all means, have it.
• When your favorite song comes on during the reception, jump around the dance floor with your best girlfriends yelling , "OMG I'm married!!," over and over again.
• Try to talk to your guests a little bit at your reception, because, well, I kind of forgot to do this and now regret it a little. I was too busy eating ice cream sundaes and dancing.

Photos: Jorge Garcia Wedding Photography

Michelle and Josh's Day Of Community And Love

When Michelle's wedding landed in my inbox, there was something about it that I loved. Maybe it was the fact that she and her husband Josh got married in the church that he grew up with, or maybe it was all the grinning faces, I don't know. But what I do know is while I was putting this post together, I kept feeling warm and wonderful. This is what a wedding should be, this is a couple and a community with enormous hearts and the right priorities. Because weddings should bring us joy, even in the midst of great heartache. And this wedding is nothing but joy.
Our wedding was held at Trinity Baptist Church in North Canton, Ohio. Josh grew up in this church and had several "second families" there, all of whom had adopted me since I had been attending with him.The reception was at the Metropolitan Centre in Canton. It was a little bit of a splurge for us, but we wanted to have a big-city feel to the day because I went to school in Boston and Josh proposed there. Living in a small town, there weren't too many options for that sort of venue, and this one was just beautiful.Our wedding was creative because we had almost a year and a half to plan it. This gave us a lot of time to come up with projects that I could do ahead of time. Josh and I spent a few months designing our own invitations -- He's not super crafty but he has good taste, so I spent my weekends at school making mock-up ones and mailing them to him for his opinion. We finally settled on a design and I spent a few days making them. Having that project done almost a year before the wedding was awesome. We also made the centerpieces while home for Christmas break and spent spring break making a reception playlist. I printed out pictures and glued them into a notebook for our guest book. We borrowed an antique truck that Josh's dad won in a raffle to get us from the ceremony to the reception.Someone in Team Practical (we don't remember who but we love you!) had the idea of serving the cake themselves and we decided to do the same. We knew the day would be rushed and there were a lot of people coming from out of town, so we wanted to make sure that we saw everyone. I wore an apron that my aunt gave me at our bridal shower and everyone loved it.We have been taking pictures of our feet throughout our entire relationship, so we wanted fun shoes to wear. I wore $20 yellow heels from Target that my mom spent an entire year trying to talk me out of, and Josh and his brother wore Converse. (They changed into them right before the wedding, you should've seen the look on his mom's face.)

Our wedding was thrifty because we both had a hard time with the "wedding tax," so if something seemed too crazy expensive, we either made it ourselves or just didn't have it. I made the bouquets the night before, following a tutorial that I found online, but let our grocery store florist make the bouts and corsages (not too expensive and I'd be no good at it). My sister was my only bridesmaid and we were planning our weddings simultaneously, so we shared a lot of ideas (and the cake servers, the guest book pen, I could go on). I bought my dress at the Filene's Basement Running of the Brides -- my roommate was engaged at the time and we went to find her a dress, and I happened to find mine the same day. It was crazy cheap and fit perfectly without alterations, and freed up a lot of money for other things that we wanted. Josh wore a suit that we found at H&M. Laura and I went to Dillards and found her a cute black dress for $80 and wore shoes that she already had. Josh's grandma made his little sister's flower girl dress. I bought our invitation envelopes in Times Square when we went on a mini-vacation there last summer.We unfortunately were not lucky enough to have a cast of family and friends with wedding-related talents (aside from my cousin, who did my hair), so we didn't have a homemade cake or our best friend running the music. Money was tight for both of us and our families, but the beautiful "coming together" moments of our wedding were when people saw that we were cutting things because we couldn't afford them, and offered to pay. We didn't hit anyone up for money or give them a sad story about how we were missing out on a fancy cake, but they were excited for us and offered what they could.What made our wedding sane was that we got married. I was really good at having the occasional "let's just elope" freakout, but thankfully Josh was even better at the "at the end of this, you will be my wife" speech. Getting married at his home church by the pastor that helped raise him helped us both feel grounded and connected to our families and friends. There were people there that had known us both for our whole lives and our whole relationship, so it really felt like everyone was invested in what was happening.There had been a lot of stressful things in our life leading up to the wedding -- my dad was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma and had to go through chemo, finishing his treatment the week after we got married. My cousin lost both of his legs in a hit-and-run in June, and he and my aunt and uncle were in Texas, working on his recovery. It was a hard summer in a lot of ways, but we focused on the joy for a day. The only tears shed during the day were by my sister during her awesome speech, who claims that she's "allergic to microphones" (she did the same at her wedding). No happy tears even, as far as I saw -- we were all just laughing, like we were finally relieved.One last thing that helped keep us sane was being engaged for so long. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, it did get a little bit old at times, but it gave us a lot of time to work things out. We had time to go through premarital counseling and talk to friends and family about what to expect. We spent almost the entire time apart, going to school and working in different states, so instead of seeing movies or listening to music or going for drives together, all we did was talk. It was tedious sometimes but we talked through some really hard things together, and I think that gave us a stronger foundation than we would've had otherwise.My favorite moments came from people after the fact -- a close family friend said that it was the most fun wedding she'd ever been to, because she could feel our joy; his grandma said she felt like it was a glimpse into our lives together. Those were our two main goals, and the fact that the people that came could feel that meant the world to us.

Photos: Christopher Blues Photography

Ninon and Dan's Quaker New York City Wedding

I'm so delighted to get to share Ninon and Dan's wedding with you. I've shared a number of reader weddings that used a Quaker-style wedding service, but this is the first honest-to-goodness traditional Quaker wedding I've had the privilege of sharing. As Ninon says, "Dan and I were married 'Under the Care' of Flushing Meeting, which is the real deal." Their wedding is beautiful, and I've found that Ninon's words have had particular resonance with me this week. As I've noticed my brain running off to obsess about things like "Oh, goodness, do we need ceremony decorations?" I keep coming back to the importance that Quakers put on simplicity. For me it's been an important reminder that simplicity has i's own beauty and its own value. And with that, I'll let Ninon take it away:We married the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Nov. 29, 2008. One of my best friends said it was pretty smart getting married around a nationally mandated holiday of thanks. Dan and I quite agree! Our wedding was informed by both joy and loss. My mother, who passed away five years ago this May, was a big inspiration. Finding creative and non-morbid ways to include her spirit and love was important to me. Celebrating with family was central to us both. When you have suffered a loss, like the death a mother, really taking the time to savor and hold up an occasion of joy becomes a beautiful thing. Bringing our families and wonderful friends together to truly celebrate life and love was our main focus.Our wedding was held in Flushing, Queens. We had a traditional Quaker wedding ceremony at the historic Flushing Quaker Meetinghouse which dates back to 1694.The outside of the Meetinghouse was under construction, scaffolding surrounding the old wood building and everything. When I first found out, just three months before our wedding, that the scaffolding would be up I was heartbroken. A construction site was not what we had pictured when we set
our date. But then it helped me embrace my motto for the wedding. "It's not going to be perfect! It's going to be amazing, but not perfect." This motto kept me sane and kept me focused on the things that were really important - friends and family coming together to celebrate Dan's and my love and union.We had the reception across the street at Flushing Town Hall, another historic site that is a working theatre. Dan and I are both actors, so it was perfect. Umm, I mean amazing!What made our wedding creative:
Our Save the Dates and our New Yorker inspired invitations were really fun. Our dear friend and creative soul mate, Paige Panzner-Kozek (paige.cards@gmail.com) helped us realize our literal take on the Save the Date (we sent actual dates, as in the dried fruit, all across the map). And she created a mini New Yorker magazine for our invitations.These both set a fun tone for our wedding and the response from our family and friends was amazing. We also incorporated fall in a lot of creative ways. Instead of vases for our centerpieces our florist used hollowed-out squash. The escort cards were die-cuts of pumpkins and leaves that I found online. My in-laws grew large pumpkins that we used to line the stage at the reception.

What made our wedding thrifty:
Many things:
We got ready at home, good friends did my makeup and hair,we took the subway out to Flushing, my dress was a bridesmaid's dress from Jenny Yoo (just done in white) and our DJs were recent college-grads who had worked at their university's radio station - dance elves solidly outside the WIC. Dan wore his grandfather's tux. It just needed slight alterations and it was a wonderful way to incorporate family and be a bit green as well. His "groomsmen" wore suits they already owned.
But, hands down the biggest thrift was my amazing brother, Chef Dan, who did our food. He hand cooked most of it, spent the days leading up (even Thanksgiving!) prepping it all himself and then had staff day-of to help. I told my brother early on, "I don't want you to work my wedding." But he wouldn't have it any other way. He poured all his love for me and my husband into one of the best dinners we and our guests have ever had. It was the best wedding present we got!What made our wedding sane:
Our day-of coordinator Jessica Prunell. Now, I never thought I'd be a bride with a wedding coordinator! I'm a Quaker for god's sake; we take simplicity very seriously. But I also did not want to run around like a chicken with my head cut off. I wanted to be in the moment which I knew, for me, meant getting professional help. We found the amazingly talented Jessica, who was organized, thorough, calm and truly worked so that we would have a wonderful and magical day. She was worth her weight in gold.My motto, "It's not going to be perfect! It's going to amazing, but not perfect," was the linchpin of my sanity. And the Quaker wedding ceremony itself really grounded the day.With its moments of contemplative silence and meditation, Dan and I got to sink down and truly feel the moment. It was, dare I say, perfect.
And last, but certainly not least, A Practical Wedding blog helped me keep perspective on a daily basis. It even made me laugh when I was in the throws of obsessing about things that, in the end, did not matter. (Editors note: Awwwwwwww...)

Thank you to you both. May your lives together be long, and filled with as much love and intention as this first perfectly imperfect day of marriage. Cheers to you both!

All photos by Jenny Ebert

Faith & Mike's Food And Community Wedding

I'm not quite sure I have words to express how I feel about today's wedding, which turns out to be ok, because Faith (an editor at Apartment Therapy's The Kitchn) has all the words for me. What I will say is this: Faith has, in one page, summed up David's and my philosophy around our own wedding better than I have ever been able to put into words. By the time I finished reading Faith's post, I was a weepy mess from the enormity of love, beauty, and thoughtfulness poured into this wedding. I hope you like it a quarter as much as I do, because that would be very much indeed.
Mike and I were married last September in Columbus, Ohio. We really value our community of friends and family, and we wanted a celebration that would thank them for all their support in our journey, and acknowledge that marriage isn't just a joining of two people: it's more far-reaching than that.

I'm a food writer, so food and drink are crazy important to both of us. We lucked out big time with our caterer, Creative Cuisine. John, our contact there, is on the board of the Ohio organic and ecological farming association, and he was able to bring in some local ingredients. He was great to work with: I gave him my dream menu and he not only pulled it off but at a great price too.
Important words: We pulled out a few words to keep us anchored and centered during the process. Hospitality was one. I read once that a wedding reception is a bride and bridegroom's first act of hospitality as a married couple. This drove a lot of the decisions we made: is this idea hospitable? Also, community. We have deep friendships with people all over the country, and we wanted to bring them together in a one-day reunion!
Being practical: A Practical Wedding was a big inspiration. I like the thought that being practical means doing what's right for YOU - not just what the wedding industry or indie crowd thinks is ideal. This post also made me crow! So true.

We paid a little more for our wedding than we planned, but it was a deliberate decision. We wanted to serve everyone an excellent meal with great wine, and this is where the majority of our money went. It was 110% worth it. We were very frugal in other areas, but we also tried to be sensible in balancing creativity and time vs. the convenience (and sanity) of paying others to do things. We had a short engagement of about 4 months, so this was important.

Also on practicality and frugality: we had the wedding on a Sunday afternoon, which saved us quite a bit on venue. We also decided to keep our wedding party intimate: just our siblings and one good friend as the flower girl. I felt strongly about paying for my bridal party's dresses - one thing that has always annoyed me about American weddings is the expectation for people to drop a ton of money on a dress they will of course, "wear again." Keeping the parties intimate kept costs down, but the real reason was just that we wanted to stick with people that we know will be in our lives forever.

Being creative: It was so fun to think through ways to save money, be creative, and be hospitable to our guests.
- We created our invites ourselves. I commissioned a papercut from Cindy Fergusonwebsite, and I even used a bit of the sage leaves as a design on custom-printed linen for my dress. Also, I love letterpress, but we decided not to splurge on it. Instead we ordered a custom embosser (about $60) with this image and stamped it on our envelopes, menus, and other print materials. It gave that lovely raised feel without the expense. Type geeks will appreciate: We bought one classic font and used it across all our print materials.
- A talented friend made my dress. (I catered her wedding dessert reception the year before.) It was a combo of linen custom-printed by Anna of Food Flowers Style and really inexpensive silk I bought at a remnants shop. We kept it very simple: an empire shift, basically. I wanted something natural and easy to move around in. It wasn't a princess dress, and even though this gave me a tiny pang, occasionally, it was so lovely and such a right choice for who I am.

- We used old glass jars bought on Craigslist for the flower arrangements. I had about 20 girlfriends over the day before the wedding for brunch, and we did the flowers together. It was a blast, and I was able to have the more offbeat flowers and greens that I love. I cleaned the jars out and now they hold grains in my pantry.

- We wanted a mix of urban, pastoral, and vintage in our wedding. We love the city, and our venue was an old former factory downtown. You can see the city and the highways all around, but there is a central grassy area where we held the ceremony.
- Vintage things were so fun; I used old library drawers to hold the escort cards, and vintage flashcards for table numbers. We wrote notes to each of our guests on the escort cards. Bringing our family history in was important. We displayed old photos on the guest welcome table, and we created mini family histories through wedding photos on the website.
- We did a photobooth, too, but we just used my own camera on a tripod and a remote. Friends brought props, and I printed up the photos after the wedding and included them in people's thank you notes.
The menu: It was a September wedding, and I wanted to have a menu that reflected the seasons. Before the ceremony we had house-made sweet potato chips with rosemary, and a fizzy apple cider drink. After the ceremony, during the photos, there was a cocktail hour with white wine, deviled eggs with capers, and crostini with apple slices, brie, and honey. (Honey was a theme: I used beeswax candles on all the tables in little glass tumblers that are now at home and well-used in our kitchen!) Supper was beet coleslaw, focaccia bread, pasta with butternut squash and sage, roasted fall vegetables, and an herb-crusted pork loin. We set up long tables so everyone felt like they were at one big dinner table, and we passed the food family style.

- We bought the wine ourselves -- two inexpensive but really great favorites. The leftovers all came home with us!

- I made two kinds of cake, as well as lemon ice cream. This was hectic, but totally worth it! (You can see more about the cake on The Kitchn.)

- I wanted my mom's family to participate somehow, so I asked my aunts and grandma to bring sweets for another dessert table. This was a huge hit. (Also more about the family sweets table here.)

- We aren't into dancing, much (hello! we're rather geeky. No one wants to watch us dance...) but we love music, so we asked friends and family to play at a sort of open mic instead. A couple friends sang some of our favorite songs. Another friend played a hilarious Elvis medley, and Mike and his mom and brother played an old Italian folk tune. Then his mom played a surprise encore of "That's Amore!" on her accordion, to great hilarity and group singing. There were a lot of kids there and they were all up and dancing during the music!
- We cut and served our own cake. This was by far the most meaningful part of the meal. We wanted to feed everyone from the time they got there to the time they left, and to serve our sweet cake together to all our friends and family was a good way to do a "receiving" line too.

Last words: No wedding is perfect. It's just the kickoff to a marriage that also won't be perfect, but hopefully both will reflect your spirits and your values. I know that not everyone has a religion or a faith connected to their wedding, but if you do, this is the time to put it front and center. We did a lot of things very differently, and dispensed with lots of purported wedding tradition (no unity candle!), but we did stick with short, simple, and old-fashioned words in our ceremony. We wanted to be connected to the longstanding supports of tradition, community, and strength we have available in our personal faiths. (No pun intended. Har.)
Also, we feel that our love of hospitality comes from God's own hospitality towards us, and while we understand that not everyone has the same beliefs and traditions we do, for us it was such a deep pleasure to look down the rows of tables and see all our dearest friends and family enjoying one another with good food in community. For us, that's one of the deepest expressions of what our faith means. After all the fun and creativity of a wedding is over, we are stuck with one another, and I believe we all need something -- whether that is faith, friends, a common purpose -- to help us remember our vows and love each other over the long haul. It's what a wedding is all about, right? The more you can emphasize that unifying factor during that one shining day, the more memorable it will be. Our friends and that loaded table of food symbolize a lot of this for us, and those are the memories of our wedding that will last.

Photos: Bryan and Joleen Fenstermacher, photographers extraordinaire. Also, Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan (food pics) and our friend Bom Yi Kim.