Wedding Graduate: Sarah (My Wedding Doppelganger)

Some of you will remember that last summer, I fell in love with this one wedding picture, this one blurry Holga that Heather & Jon of One Love Photo shot, more than any other wedding picture from last summer other than our own. I didn't know why, but I fell crazy crazy in love with it:Well, it turns out this was from Sarah & Josh's wedding, the wedding Heather & Jon shot this wedding the weekend after our wedding. And it also turns out I could not have more of a wedding sister than Sarah. I mean, EVERYTHING, from hipster cowboy shirts getting ready, to jewish weddings, to wedding photographers, to blackberry desserts, to... I would say... the spirit of the thing. So of course I fell in love with the first photo I saw. Of course. So this wedding comes in two parts: first, Sarah's regular wedding graduate post with lots and lots of pictures. Second, tomorrow, Sarah's essay about wrestling with issues of sexuality and feminism during the weddings process. So here is Sarah, who realized mid-way through the planning process that she did *not* want to spend what they were planning to spend, ditched it all, and threw a party in the backyard. A party in the back yard that embodied every single important part of a wedding. It embodied why we do all this.Let me tell you the story of my wedding “disaster,” and the lessons I learned from it. Since our wedding was held on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, we were counting on the ferry to transport our guests from Seattle. The ferries are occasionally 10 or 15 minutes late, and we’d factored that into our plans. What we never could have predicted, though, was that one of the two ferries would break down mid-morning, sending the ferry schedule for the rest of the day into complete disarray. When my phone rang with the news, I was really upset for about 2 minutes. I thought: What a disaster! All our guests are going to be late! The Rabbi is going to be late! Our band will be late! Maybe everyone will give up and just go home!!! And then, I caught myself as I realized—wait, this is my wedding day. Am I going to spend it being stressed out and worried because something out of my control went wrong? Of course I wasn’t going to do that. As soon as I realized that, everything fell back into place, and I went back to enjoying the wonderful day.As it turned out, the schedule change was a blessing in disguise. We suddenly had extra-time for leisurely portraits, not to mention a glass of champagne on the patio. Slowly, our guests began to arrive, and we had the unexpected treat of getting to see many of them before the ceremony. In a Jewish wedding, there are usually several ceremonies that occur before the public ceremony under the Huppah (wedding canopy). The change in schedule meant that we got to share these with a small crowd of our friends and family, rather than hold them in private as we had planned. Our Rabbi even surprised us at the end by inviting our guests up to individually offer their blessings to us, and this turned out to be a very moving experience.The lesson? Plan everything, but don’t freak out when something doesn’t happen the way you planned. The unexpected might turn out to be just what you needed.

What ended up being most important on the wedding day was the simple fact that my groom and I were getting married.That said, here are a few other things that I was really happy we did:

• We hired a really great klezmer band and we got everyone dancing right away, during the cocktail hour. It was festive, it was wild, and it was very Jewish, but you don’t have to be Jewish to start off with some great music and dancing! I loved that it was over-the-top celebratory, nothing else could have captured the pure elation of that day for us.
• One of my amazing aunts came into town a few days before the wedding, and she took over overseeing all the actual details of the wedding day. She even ironed out a few kinks I hadn’t foreseen in advance. It took a lot of planning on my part to get everything I had in mind down on paper so that I could pass it off to her, but it was well worth it. You don’t want to be fielding phone calls or worrying about checking to make sure your floral arrangements are in the right places on the day of your wedding, trust me. I was so grateful I had someone I completely trust there to take over for me.
• I was really happy that my groom and I found a few private moments together throughout the evening. Following Jewish custom, we had about 10 minutes of private time together right after the ceremony, and then, in some kind of strange miracle, at one point we found ourselves alone in the backyard with the band playing a slow dance song just for us… sigh! It was all so magical.
• We just got our wedding photos. Since we held the wedding at my mom’s house and had it catered by my groom’s uncle, wedding photography was our single biggest expense. I’m really glad we made the splurge because our photographs are amazing, and now we have a permanent document of all of the magic of that day.

Most of the other details are not worth stressing out about. Spend time picking out invitations and flowers and your dress and your hairstyle if that is enjoyable for you and helps you get prepared for the amazing day. But: if you find yourself freaking out that the hairpiece you bought isn’t going to work with the new hairstyle you’ve just settled on (ahem, did I actually worry about this at one point?), take a deep breath and walk away from the feathers and tiny faux pearls. Seriously, this is a sign that you need a break from all things wedding.It is probably impossible to plan a wedding without getting into some stressful situations, particularly if you have family and/or friends closely involved in the planning. It helped me to remember that our wedding was an emotional event for our families and friends, too. Try to be grateful and compassionate, especially when you have a disagreement with them about something wedding related. There is probably a solution to whatever the issue is, and you’ll figure it out with a little bit of discussion and patience.Brides and grooms to be: congratulations on your upcoming wedding, and best wishes for a joyful wedding day and a long and happy marriage.

All photos by One Love Photo, they were our photographers and I can't say enough good things about them. I don't think Sarah can either. (Sponsor, but this is not a sponsored post)

Wedding Graduate: Rebecca of Princess Max

I'm thrilled to introduce Rebecca's beautiful beautiful interfaith wedding, and her wise advice. (And can we talk about her dress? I know that's a little shallow, given all the beauty at hand, but girlfriend, WOW). You can read more about Rebecca and her wedding planning at Princess Max, but now, I give you the girl herself:
This was my second wedding and my partner’s first. I can’t tell you that I would do it again for myself but it was so important for our family relationships and for my husband. We are still very new to one another (we only dated 6 months before we got engaged) and so this ritual act turned out to be very important, both in the relationship dynamics that it made us examine and as a milestone to look back upon and measure our growth from. I wrote a wedding program with footnotes (one of which cited this website) so I wanted to share what I learned from the wedding event.The best advice I can give for your wedding is to spend the hour before the ceremony grounding yourself in something that defines you. We modified a Jewish custom and spent the hour separately with our families. My grandma, aunts, uncles, cousins and nuclear family did a Bible study, sang hymns and prayed like we do every year at our reunions. This involves much laughter and reflected something I have done regularly for my entire life. For you it might be knitting or being with your partner or playing basketball. Do it. You want to be yourself when you get married, not some stressed-out stranger in a bride costume.

One of the best things we did was to give people permission to buy things that were not on the registry. Using alternativegiftregistry.org and really encouraging second-hand or personally-chosen gifts made people feel much more engaged in our celebration. We gave generally types of things that we needed (crock pot, drying rack, 12 ounce stock pot, etc) and explicated asked people to search their cabinets or to choose the brand that they liked best.

Along the same lines, I would encourage you to make your wedding site an actual blog. In addition to logistical details, we wrote stories about how we felt when we were first dating, vignettes about how we were reminded that this love was worth it even amidst the fighting, anecdotes about excited conversations with friends and descriptions of how we decided that both of us would hyphenate our names. Wait 24 hours before posting anything that you write so that you’re not using the blog as a passive-aggressive tool but don’t be afraid to mention that you have had struggles while leaving out ALL gory details. This isn’t the place to work out any of your feelings but if you are authentic about the fact that you had them, it will help the people who don’t know you yet feel closer to you on the actual day of your wedding. I got so much positive feedback for doing this.However, It’s OK to not meet your guests every need. Obviously, do this politely, but I found myself in such a defensive state because of the pressures of many of the people involved in the wedding that I had to give myself permission to do this. If you are having an intimate affair or have planned a giant party because you have followed the great advice to choose two or three things that are important to you and one of those things is seeing everyone you have loved all in one room, this advice is not for you. If you have arrived at an event that has quite a few new-to-you guests through compromise with your partner, it’s OK not to make the rounds. I never attend a wedding expecting more than to say more to the couple than, “You look so beautiful! Thank you for including me.” So I wasn’t expecting the number of people I barely knew who wanted to buttonhole me for ten minutes when I wanted to be dancing or just being with my family and so I gave myself permission that this event did not have to be the time when I sat down for heart-to-hearts with every person who wanted it. This event would be a shared experience that would feed our growing relationships. It’s OK to do this. I have not had one repercussion in the six months since the wedding.
This leads me to my next insight, which is that you and your partner may not be on the same page about what makes a perfect wedding and that’s OK, too. I remember feeling so frustrated with the wedding blogs I was reading because it seemed like every writer had a partner who was absolutely just like her because s/he was passionate about letterpress, too. My husband and I have very different aesthetic styles, very different socializing styles, very different relationships with our families, very different personal histories and very different religions. Each and every one of these differences had to be hashed out and that was exhausting. It was made worse by feeling like every other couple out there just needed to figure out whether they would have a rockabilly fiesta or gnomes-and-buttons campout because both were integral parts of their relationship. I had to remind myself constantly that loving someone is not reliant upon liking the same things they do.

This has been said before but you do not need to DIY the hell out of your wedding, even if you are crafty. People are there to witness and celebrate your joy and fear as you make this preposterous commitment together. Everything else – and I mean everything else – is extra. Do only the things you actually want to do instead of the things that you want to have done. I wanted to make all the yarmulkes out of thrift store dress shirts and custom fabric because I wanted to do the work, not because of what it would contribute to the event. I found a great organization that employs developmentally disabled people to sew the handkerchiefs from the custom fabric because I didn’t want to do that work. Be deliberate about your crafting choices to maintain your sanity.If you are enlisting the help of friends AND forgoing traditional bridesmaids, give people titles. It honors the relationship you have and empowers them to take ownership of the project. I watched a friend be really disappointed because although she had a large friend base, none of them wanted to step on each other’s toes so not much got done. She says now that if she had told them they were the Bridal Brigade, like I did, and explicitly given them permission to communicate with each other without going through her, she would have felt less burdened.If your wedding is existing in a non-traditional paradigm and you have adequately prepared folks for this, expect that your guests will act non-traditionally, as well. You have no idea how this will manifest. We communicated such egalitarianism that no one stood when I entered the auditorium. My parents and I were flummoxed but laughed and continued forward because there was nothing else to do. As it was an afternoon wedding, we only offered appetizers and champagne while we were in yichud, but didn’t realize this would mean people would also eat the cupcakes we wanted to cut ceremonially. My partner and I shrugged, laughed and fed each other with not one spectator but the photographer.

Finally, don’t put off your honeymoon planning. We were so overwhelmed with sorting out the relationship and family implications that come when planning a wedding that we figured we would just wing it when we arrived in our honeymoon city. However, we were so tired that we couldn’t generate the energy to be adventurous and then felt bad that we were wasting the trip. We talked through this and realized that watching lots of Cartoon Network from the hotel bed was actually OK. Also, while you’re on your honeymoon (and you should go on a honeymoon, even if it is in a cabin on a lake, like we should have done), write down your memories. Tell the whole story of your wedding to your journal. The pictures you get back will be of someone else’s perspective. Record your own perspective to cement it in your memories.Photographs: J Wiley Photography

And with love like that you know you should be glad

Our friend and rabbinical student Nikki, taught the guests a Hebrew love song, and they sang us down the aisle.

We circled each other. We did, in fact, feel our lives intertwining.

Our parents said a blessing over us.

Our Rabbi had Nikki poured us our first glass of wine, which, per her suggestion was a sweet wine. A sweet, high alcohol desert wine. She told Nikki to pour us a whole mug full. We waved our hands and said, "Ssttttttttttooooooppppp." She didn't. We had to pass the wine around to the huppah holders to finish it off.

We said our vows. I had carried David's ring on my bouquet, and when I tried to pull it off, I dropped it and it rolled away, so I dashed after it in my heels.

The Rabbi pulled out her drash. It was clearly five pages. Oh dear, this was going to be long. I took off my shoes and settled in.

Our friend Nikki sang the seven wedding blessings to us, and her eyes filling with tears of joy.

They poured the second glass of wine, just as big as the first. This time we drank it. All. Well, sort of chugged it, really.

Our friend Caron read the Tom Robbins excerpt about cheese cake. Everyone laughed. She read the bit about peeing out the window, everyone held their breath, wondering what to do. I very loudly said, "AMEN!" Collective laugh.

Our friend Lacey read "I like you," and her voice cracked in the middle.

The guests all put our hands on us to bless us, and I started crying into my grandmothers handkerchief.

David broke the glass.

We kissed.
We kissed.
We kissed.

Everyone sang Siman Tov and Mazel Tov... as we walked through the crowd, me holding my bouquet over my head in victory, both giddy with joy.Eating fruit in our yichud, looking at our wedding rings, relaxing, as blissed out as we've ever been, hearing our yichud guards make jokes on the other side of the door. Feeling loved and blessed.

And then we were ready to party. PARTYPARTYPARTY.

The Aisle Walk

You know how people tell you that walking down the aisle will be a transcendent experience? Well, it wasn't for me. SOMETHING at your wedding will be a transcendent experience, but it might not be walking down the aisle.

Me: How did I look walking down the aisle? Did I look pretty?
David: You looked pretty. (pause) You looked teary.
Me: Oh well, that's sweet.
David: Well. Sort of. You looked teary like, 'What the hell am I doing here?'
Me: Oh.

(Pause)

Me: That's sort of how I felt.

But you know what saved it? I walked out the doors, everyone stood up, I felt really overwhelmed, and right then our friends four year old* who was wearing red cowboy boots, a white rosebud dress, and an enormous pink flower perched right on top of her head, turned around from her seat in the back row, saw me, and with great excitement leaned out into the aisle, waved her whole arm over her head sort of drawled, "Heeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"And that my friends, that is the kind of detail that matters.

*Who some of you rightly suggested was perhaps channeling tiny Meg from the past. Or really, is a Meg of the future.
First picture: I have prettier ones of the aisle walk, but this some how channels the fact that I was doing some serious deep breathing. Second picture speaks for itself. Both, of course by One Love Photo

At Our Ketubah Signing:

Our Rabbi: David, say, "I promise to love you, respect you, and support you as Jewish husbands have always done for their wives."
David: I promise to love you, respect you, and support you as Jewish husbands have always done for their wives.
Rabbi: Meg, say, "I promise to love you, respect you and support you as Jewish wives have always done for their husbands."
Me: I promise to love you, respect you, and support you as Jewish wives have always done for their husban.... WAIT, no that's not right!
Rabbi: Oh! Sorry! Partners! I mean, wives! I mean, partners!
David: No, it was right.
Me: No it wasn't.... oh, I mean yes it was. Oops.
Rabbi: Now you're just trying to confuse me. I had a pair of lesbians yesterday.Photo of our Ketubah and my moment of realization by One Love Photo

The Morning Wedding: Whys and Wherefores

I've been meaning to write a post about the hows and whys of a morning wedding, and an email from Team Practical member Sarah has reminded me to do it, so here we go.

First of all, we had no intention of having a morning wedding. David and I define a good party by how much we get to dance (and drink) and I'd always figured that you get to dance and drink more at night. Done. Or, not really done, actually. When we first looked at our venue, we had one of those moments of revelation. I walked in and I turned to David (who wasn't even inside the venue yet, poor thing) and said, "This place is for me. This is our place. We're getting married here." And when you know, you know. The thing is, our venue happens to be one of the most beautiful in the bay area, and staggeringly affordable (ONLY for the bay area) since it's run by Parks and Rec. So, it books up a year and a half in advance. And even though we booked it a year and a half in advance, Saturday evenings were already gone. So, Sunday morning it was. Good for religious reasons,* but I was dubious.

Fast forward a year and a half, and I won't have done it any other way. Here is the scoop:

Cons:

• People always talk about how much money you will save having a Sunday morning wedding. Maybe. But we didn't. First of all, we didn't have a ton of vendors, and, um, the flower mart and ipod did not give us a discount for getting married on Sunday. Our amazing photographers flew in from Seattle for the weekend to shoot our wedding, so no discount (other than the fact that they totally undercharged us for their talent). Second, we had a Jewish wedding. Jewish weddings are almost always on Sundays. Our caterer was Jewish, and she could have booked 10 weddings that day. No discount. (Note to vendors: if you're complaining that you can't book Sundays, you need to be advertising in Jewish publications or hanging out with more Jews.)
• You have to get up EARLY. I'm not going to lie to you. We were up at 6. I wake up at 5 on most mornings, so I joked that I got to sleep in, but yeah. Early.
  
• You're pre-wedding morning will be rushed, there is no way around that. The good thing about that is that a lot of the things you have to do pre-wedding are not that fun... like say, taking group pictures. So you have an excuse to rush through them. Excellent.

Pros:

• The light, the light, the light. If you're getting married in a beautiful place, or outdoors, the morning light is unbeatable, and you'll be able to see your surroundings for the whole party. We had sweeping mountains behind us, and trees around us, and it would have been a shame to waste that on the night.
  
• You know how people say, "Oh, but no one will dance and drink at a morning wedding"? This is a lie. If you dance and drink, everyone else will dance and drink too. (though David pointed out if that IS true for you, you'll save money on drinks. Excellent.)
  
• Afterwards. The strange thing is that when people voice concern about morning weddings, they normally ask you, "Well, what did you do afterwards?" Here is the scoop. Afterwards is *the best part.* We drove away from our venue, waving like crazy, at 2:45 pm. You know what we did? We went back to the hotel room we'd splurged on. We lounged around. We talked about the wedding. We giggled. We looked at our wedding rings. We blissed out. We went shopping at a used bookstore and bought books for our honeymoon flight. We went out to a really nice dinner, and I wore my wedding hair flower. We drank mojitos. We went to sleep. We woke up not-hung over. The after-the-wedding is the best part of getting married in the morning. Think about it this way: you're marring your partner because you like spending time with them. Morning weddings give you lots of time to hang out together, married, on your wedding day. And then you wake up sober and happy. What could feel better than that?
  

So, are morning weddings better than evening weddings? No. Evening weddings are fantastic too. But morning weddings are the unsung heroes of the wedding world. People tell you they are only worth it for the discounts, and I'm telling you that we got no discounts and we would do it again in a heartbeat.

Picture: The mimosa bar at our wedding, which I never saw. Shot by our talented friend Gabby on expired Polaroid film. Nice.

*Jewish weddings traditionally take place late on Saturday night or on Sunday. In Judaism you are not supposed to mix blessings, because when blessings are mixed you enjoy them less. So since Shabbat is a blessing and a wedding is a blessing, weddings are not supposed to take place on Shabbat (Friday sundown - Saturday sundown). This sounds silly, but the day of rest mandated before your wedding day, actually is a enormous blessing.

Wedding Graduate: Accordions and Lace

One of the best things about writing this blog has been the wedding sisters that I have found. I started the wedding graduate series when my best online girlfriends got married, and I wanted to find out what they had learned. This spring, I've had the delight to get to know Anna, the thoughtful writer between Accordions and Lace. Anna and I got married a week apart, and both had Jewish weddings with interfaith families and piles of dahlias. We bonded over similar heartaches and similar joys. Because of that, I thought it would be interesting to run our wedding graduate posts back to back: hers today and mine tomorrow. While I swear we wrote them independently, the posts echo each other. Anna's is as long as mine is short, but read it all the way through (and oogle the deep rich pictures that will make you tear up). This lady is smart as h*ll.

We loved our wedding, in that intense way that a person loves something when it's been hard work to obtain it. It was an endless night of hugs. It felt exactly how standing in the middle of a room surrounded by almost 100 people who love you should feel.

The morning after, I will admit that I was lying in bed and already thinking about what lessons I had learned that might be useful for other women. What can I say--I am all about solidarity, and I am a nerd. And it turns out that I have a lot to say, so I apologize in advance for the length of this tome, but here's what I've got:

The details matter, but not how you think they will. While we were not hugely detail-oriented, the mister and I still spent many hours gocco-ing, painting, photoshopping, etc. I was sure that on the actual day I would feel like an idiot for having put so much energy into unimportant details. I didn't. It’s not like I walked around our reception hall lovingly admiring our handiwork--I had bigger stuff on my mind! But when I looked around this room full of most of the people that I love in this world, all having an awesome time, I was overwhelmed with the feeling that we had created this. Assembling our huppah quilt (made of pieces lovingly crafted by our friends and family) was a long and sometimes stressful ordeal--but it gave people ownership over our Jewish ceremony in an amazing way that calmed my fears that our over 50% non-Jewish guests would not be able to relate to our ceremony. It was a physical representation of community that set the tone of our wedding. I don't regret spending time on the details, not because of the aesthetics, but because they all came together to make us all feel loved, special, included, excited, and all manner of other cool things.

One of the smartest things we did was schedule little bits of quiet time into our wedding day. We got ready by ourselves, at home. It felt right to iron his shirt while he
showered, and for him to be the one to zip me up. There was no photographed "first look", no staged drama--this allowed us a bit of calm and comfort before the chaos. Our most meaningful moment alone was our Yichud, the Jewish tradition in which the couple spends some time alone directly after the ceremony. Thank goodness for the Yichud; my only emotional breakdown happened during the recessional, when the reality of what had just happened hit me like a tonne of bricks. By the time we got to our little room, I was a mess of tears. we would not have been able to greet and play host to our guests had we not had 20 minutes or so to just breathe, cry, and process what had just happened. It allowed us to feel so much more centered and present for the rest of the evening.

On a similar note, dear lord, have yourself a honeymoon. I know that many folks are strapped for cash or can't take time off directly after the wedding, but if you can even take two days to go 10 miles outside town, it's worth it. We needed time to be together, to process what had just happened, to stare at the rings on our fingers and repeat to each other, "this is so crazy." It's not necessarily about going somewhere super exotic or absurd luxury, it's just about having that time to go, "whoa, we're married," about the three million times that one needs to do so until it sinks in. (It still hasn't sunk in!)
Take breaks to step back and take stock of where you're going. We began with a lot of grandiose ideas, and it helped to take occasional moments, often over brunch, to assess how we were doing, and adjust our ideas as we needed to. Some of those plans, like the mister homebrewing all of the beer for the wedding, were ditched due to legalities. Others, like the DIY cookbooks full of our favourite recipes that would be our favours, were ditched because we just didn't feel like it. It is crucial for one's enjoyment of the process to take these steps back, and more importantly, to never, ever, for a single second, feel guilty when you change your mind or get rid of stuff, even if it is because you were just too damn lazy. I am oddly proud that we made a lot of decisions based solely on the fact that we couldn't be bothered.
Let yourself experience it. I know us blogging ladies are painfully self-reflective. I hashed out how the prospect of marriage was making feel online and off, and visualized our ceremony to the point of tears a few dozen times. I thought I had a pretty good grip on how I would feel on the day of. I was wrong, and it is awesome that I was wrong. That is the beauty of it: the intense wave of emotions that swept over me; the desire to hug every single person that I'd ever met; I couldn't have foreseen it and I just needed to, well, feel it. We can predict all sorts of things, like the mood we will set with our music and decor, but we cannot predict what it will feel like in that very moment, and we should embrace that as a blessing.

It is your decision whether or not to be a laid back bride. You can choose this. Lots of things went wrong on our wedding day. It pissed down rain; our rabbi was late; our dinner menus were printed in the wrong language; etc. I remember walking into our venue beforehand and seeing the set-up, which was lovely, but a little bit off from the careful plans I had given them. I looked at it and thought, "it's beautiful. It's my wedding day. I am going to let go." Perfect weddings don't exist--brides who say their weddings were perfect are women who made the conscious decision not to give a shit. I have read so many blogs where brides stated that their enjoyment of their wedding was hampered by the mistakes. I'm a pretty neurotic lady, so I know that I could have been one of those brides myself, but I consciously decided to turn the perfectionist part of my brain off and have an awesome time. It's your choice too.


Start a blog. I often refer to my blog as the best wedding decision I ever made. It allowed me to work through a lot of the hard stuff in a discrete space, and to surround myself with smart, kind, supportive ladies who were working through similar things. I like to think of it as a sort of virtual consciousness raising, and let me tell you, sisterhood is powerful. It kept me sane. However, as others have warned, it's easy to OD on the pretty pictures on the blogs out there and to consequently hold yourself to a strange, made-up standard. My mister has dubbed this the "blogging industrial complex" (I love him). I had to remind myself that my goal was to create a beautiful, meaningful day for myself, my partner, and my guests. My goal was not to impress the internet. So start a blog, and make it your refuge, but don't let it weigh you down.



Finally, use your wedding as an opportunity to work on your relationship and your vision for your life together. Like I said above, a lot of hard stuff came up during our planning, but I am proud that we seized the opportunity to turn some of it into really useful conversation and action. The best example of this was our relationship to Judaism. When we first got engaged, we weren't sure that we wanted a Jewish wedding at all--I had felt quite alienated from the Jewish community ever since my rocky upbringing, and as a non-Jew, the mister didn't know what level of practice he felt comfortable with. We only knew we wanted a Jewish family, but not what that meant to us. Over the course of our engagement, I immersed myself in Jewish theology, we took a course together to learn more about the religion from a progressive perspective, and we shocked ourselves by attending temple regularly. We had a million hard conversations about what we loved and what we found troubling about our burgeoning little Jewish community, and what kind of Jewish family we wanted to have. And as hard as it was, I am grateful that we had the opportunity to learn from it. And of course, I hope that we keep on learning.

Actually, that's a really good way to end this lengthy tome: as hard as it was, I am grateful that we had the opportunity to learn from it. And to dance our asses off.

Here is wishing you both many many many years of happiness together. May you carry each other through the hard times, and rejoice together often. Now go read her blog. She's writing smart smart stuff about her wedding, showing beautiful pictures, and making me cry almost daily.

All photos courtesy of Davina + Daniel.

Musings On Marriage: Leaps Of Faith

Reader Lizzie sent me this fantastic passage by Jewish feminist writer Anita Diamant from her book "Pitching My Tent." In this passage she discusses the reasons why she married her husband, and had a wedding - not just courthouse vows. It is so lovely and wise that I had to share:

Why marry? Because marriage publicly affirms the possibility of moving toward another person without reservation. With that momentum, we are propelled toward the center of the heart, toward the center of the universe, and however far that gets us is farther than we'd otherwise go alone. Why marry? Because every wedding enacts a personal connection to the universal story of the human hope for wholeness. Because by stepping into the hyperbarically charged space on the altar (in front of the priest, under the canopy), the bride and groom join in a dance that goes all the way back to the beginning of memory. Getting married is an attempt at turning air into matter, transforming the ineffable workings of the heart into things that are "real": the invitation, the dress, the ring. The words that constitute a wedding are magical incantations of the highest order. In the presence of witnesses and voiced by a vested authority, two people are pronounced a single unit. Ta-da! And by the way, the legal arguments for extending the marriage franchise to queer couples simply acknowledge that gay men and lesbians are members of the human family, complete with photographers, caterers, and the challenge of juggling Thanksgiving between two families of origin. Every wedding is an invocation of peace and wholeness and connection and joy. Good wishes flow from family and friends, through history and community, with wings and prayers and everything that might turn out to be holy in the universe. So that's why Jim and I got married --- to receive that shower of blessings, hoping with all our hearts to make them last."

So please. Next time you feel guilty because you are stressing out a little about your dress, or your invitations, or your rings, trying to get them to be *right* for you both, and someone asks you "Why?" or "What are you doing?" Tell them you are attempting to turning air into matter, and will they please let you concentrate??

PS All you smart Jewish wedding ladies - go leave a comment on Ms. Diamant's blog. Tell her how much you appreciate her work, because I think she'd like that (and I know you own and love A New Jewish Wedding.)

Wedding Cement

We bought a hundred pounds of wedding cement this weekend (building a huppah isn't hard, but it's fairly technical).

As David hoisted the bags of cement, I swung happily on the bars of the shopping cart, "Is this what you always dreamed of when you thought of planning a wedding?"

Abby and Adam's Egalitarian Jewish Wedding

I try to feature a fair amount of Jewish weddings on this site, because, well, we're having one. If you are planning a modern-practical-egalitarian Jewish wedding, it sometimes feels like there is not a lot of inspiration out there for you. Abby sent me her wedding, and I fell in love. After you read this post, go read her Live Journal rundown as well. I'm on board with anyone who's sassy enough to say that the theme of her wedding is "Jewish." Right. And also? "Wedding." Take it away Abby:
Our wedding was held in June 2008, at Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts. We joined a synagogue for the first time after getting engaged because we wanted to have a rabbi who knows us to perform the wedding. We've since gotten really active and involved in the community and really love being part of a synagogue for the first times in our lives. Getting married (after 8 years together) was part of a conscious decision for us to be more Jewish, and joining a synagogue has really been a positive change in our lives.What made your wedding creative: We had a really mellow, fun, relaxed wedding. I'm a teacher of Deaf kids (and a Yiddishist in my spare time), and he's the ranger of a boyscout camp, and a forester, lumberjack, orchardist, and woodworker the rest of the time. We wanted to have a simple, reasonable, un-extravagant, and, well, practical Jewish wedding.Our theme was "Jewish," and beyond that "in season." I wore a cotton dress from j crew, and he wore a cotton seersucker suit, nice for a hot summer day. We wrote our own egalitarian ketubah text in Yiddish.
What made your wedding thrifty: We tried not to pay for things we didn't want to have, despite pressure from the parents (but you simply MUST have a cake! etc.). We didn't have party favors, but we did order personalized wedding yarmulkes (!!!) with our names on the inside. (<-- so worth it!) I didn't want a veil or an updo, but I did pay someone to blow dry my hair the morning of the wedding for ultimate smoothness.My dress cost $100, and his suit was $75 (bought on sale the August before!). We made our own invitations with our laser printer and cardstock and envelopes and rubber stamps. We saved a lot of money on food: Instead of hiring a full-service caterer, we went with individual vendors - a vegetarian Indian restaurant made the food, and we hired accomodators to serve and clean up. We bought the cake from a bakery and alcohol from a liquor store that delivers. A friend from the synagogue organized the cooking of an amazing array of appetizers, potluck style. We rented plates and silverware and glasses, but bought linens and cloth napkins because they were cheaper than renting. Doing things with separate vendors was a little more tricky, but we saved 60% at least over the cost of hiring a full-service caterer. We also saved money by having the wedding and reception at the synagogue, and by growing our own flowers, which our friends drunkenly arranged in vintage blue mason jars the night before the wedding. Having a Sunday lunch wedding didn't save much money (the wedding books always say that off-peak weddings are cheaper) because most places charged an extra fee to deliver on Sundays. We hired a great Klezmer band, the Wholesale Klezmer Band, and they were worth every penny. Everything, including the wedding and reception for 150 guests, the venue, the alcohol, the band, our clothes, the honeymoon, my engagement ring (a vintage sapphire) and our wedding rings, cost a total of $12,000.

What made your wedding sane: My husband is the ranger of a boyscout camp, and most of our guests stayed at the camp in bunkbeds for the weekend of the wedding. It was so fun to have everyone there, and I think my favorite part of the weekend was getting back from the Aufruf on Saturday afternoon and blowing off my manicure appointment to just hang out at home with our friends and eat lunch outside and relax.
After the wedding on Sunday, everyone went home to change and then came over to our house with marshmallows and chips and beer for a spontaneous backyard barbecue that lasted all night. It was so nice to have that time to hang out and relax with friends.

A Practical Wedding: Things To Wear On Your Head When You Wed

I've been having a hard time figuring out what I want to wear on my head as a bride. I mean, really, it shocks me that it's such a complicated decision. For my post, I was going to give you a list of all the hot indie places to get cool stylish veil alternatives (I'm looking at you, Bando) but thankfully Peonie has done all that and more. Instead, I'm going to give you the story of my search so far.

I'm a bit of a indie bride, so naturally, I'm drawn to hip and funky hairpieces. Like Miss Ten Thousand Only, I'm in love with this magical bit of feathers and netting by Sara Gabriel:
For similar reasons, I also love Christine's, of Pretty.Pretty.Paper, rocking custom veil by Leah C. Give me some netting and some flowers and I'm a happy girl. (and how HOT is she in this picture?)
Remember Kara's amazing pouf that everyone loved? It signals Bridal! Veil! While also saying 'I'm stylish, I'm myself, I'm doing my own thing.' It's also by Sara Gabriel, who's clearly got it going on. I love all of these headpieces. So why is it not that simple? Well. The veil is actually a important concept in Jewish weddings. The old-school Jewish wedding had a veiling ceremony - the groom would veil the bride before the walk down the aisle, to make sure he knew who he was marrying. These days, in progressive/feminist Judaism, that bit of tradition has been scrapped, and then reinvented. These days, there is a new-school egalitarian ritual where the bride puts a kippah (yarmulke) on the grooms head, and the groom puts on the brides veil - in a private moment before walking down the aisle . The ceremony is a way to ground yourselves in each other, alone, before the you get to the bit with the crowd. It's a way to say privately before it all begins - I see you for who exactly who you are, without all the fancy trappings, and I choose you.

And that's not even the half of it. It turns out, the veil has mystical significance as well. There is an old Jewish mystical tradition that says when a bride wears a veil walking down the aisle, the veil connects her to the future, so that when she walks to the huppah, all her children and grandchildren to the end of time walk with her.

Tear.

Now, seriously, how am I going to pass that up?

So the search is on. I want to find a slightly more traditional veil, one that I can wear across my face, that still holds true to my indie, etsy, feather loving roots. And you know, since we're making the dress, we'll be making the veil. Thus far, I've found these small bits of inspiration:
This bride (from an old MSW) helped inspire me to go with a short handmade dress. I like her veil too. It's got a 1950's simplicity about it, which I dig, and would go with my dress. It was my very first plan for a veil. The only problem is, I think it's actually a little more traditional then I am.
This photo (via Oh So Beautiful Paper by Melissa Murphy) Makes me want to have piles of tulle blowing in the wind. My sister always says "Sadly, you can't wear a good veil anywhere these days, not even in mourning. So you might as well wear it to your own wedding." Good point, that. Makes you want to go with a full out veil like this, because to heck with it, it's your one chance. But when you get down to it, is it for me? I'm wearing a short dress because I don't want anything getting in my way, so I'd never pull this off.
Thus far, this is the closest I've come to finding a veil that is, yup, tulle, but still feels indie, personal, and like something I could make feel like me. This is from a beautiful Jewish wedding that was featured in MSW years ago, and has served an inspiration to us on many fronts. Above you see the bride is signing the Ketubah.
And here she is walking down the aisle. Her veil is short, it's sassy. It says "Bite me. I'm a feminist and I'm wearing a veil," which is more or less the look I'm going for. And it is eminently, eminently make-able.

Now, if I can just figure out a way to work in some feathers (and maybe some porcupine quills) we might be getting close.

(Tales from your veil or not to veil quandary's welcome in the comments. Because darn it, this must be a hard and loaded decision for someone other then me.)