Over the last six years I have attended roughly five weddings a year. That adds up to a whole lot of weddings! I love weddings and seeing all the little personal touches that the couple mark their day with, I think it gives a real insight in to them as a couple and it is so special to be invited to celebrate with them and be given this glimpse into their lives. Every single wedding I have been to has been different and wonderful in it's own unique way.
I'll start off with my own wedding. This August we celebrated five years of married life and every time we go to a wedding I always think back to our own day. You could call our wedding traditional in pretty much every sense. We had a traditional CofE church wedding, I arrived at the church from my parent's house in an open top vintage Rolls Royce. After the wedding we had a traditional wedding breakfast and evening reception in a beautiful marquee in my parent's garden. I think the touches that you could say were personal were really the colours, ivory and gold for the service, then adding deep red at the reception. With the help of my Dad and my younger brother we designed and made all our own wedding stationary. The cars were very special as my husband and his father are very in to cars and they chose them, with my supervision of course! We had a chocolate fountain and traditional sugared almond favours. We also had some very special songs played during the course of the night that meant a lot to us and our families. We had very personal readings and hymns at the service and the church has special significance for us. I believe that our day reflected us and our tastes, our values and it was a perfect day for us.
Here are a couple of my favourite photos from our day:
Also this August my older brother Steve and my sister-in-law Hannah celebrated their first wedding anniversary. If you a a returning reader of my blog you will have read the review Hannah wrote on the theatre production of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe that they saw as their celebration. Their wedding was definitely very personal to them, there were so many touches that they gave it that really put their stamp on the day. They also had a traditional church service but with the very special extra that Hannah's father gave a sermon. They had a BBQ wedding breakfast at the reception at The Greenwich Yacht Club, followed by a live band, glow sticks and glow in the dark face paint. They laid on a red routemaster bus to transport everyone from the hotel to the church, and then on to the reception. The wedding car was a stretch red Ferrari and all the bunting and decoration for the reception venue was made by the bride's mother. As a couple they are very in to music and have been to a large number of gigs and festivals so all the tables were named after different festivals they've been to and the tickets formed the table signs. Also, the placemats were old vinyls which they had written people's names on and they had tried to match the person to the most appropriate artist or album. Neither of them have a sweet tooth so instead of a wedding cake they had a cake they built out of huge wheels of cheese that they then served as the evening buffet. Finally, they also designed and created all their own stationary.
Here are a couple of my favourite photos from their day:
In the course of all the weddings we have been to we have been lucky to have attended two abroad. Firstly. In August of 2012 we flew out to Malta for a week for the wedding of our friends Mark and Anastasia. It is a recurring theme that all the weddings I'm talking about have designed and created their own wedding stationary. Mark and Anastasia had the theme of Me to You Bear running through all their stationary. Anastasia lost her father a number of years prior to her wedding so she had a very special candle in an engraved glass holder burning in his memory during the ceremony and the reception. The bride's sister and I both read special readings at the ceremony and they also had an additional speech made by a close friend at the wedding breakfast. Something rather unusual happened at the end of the night that has not happened at any of the weddings I have been to either before or since. The groom was thrown in the swimming pool! This wedding was very special to me as I was honoured to not only be asked to do a reading but my husband and I were also witnesses and I was the maid-of-honour. If you read my previous post entitled Creative Writing you will have read a description of the National Wedding Fair. It was for my friend Anastasia that I attended this and my day there with her gave me the inspiration.
Here are a couple of my favourites from the day:
The second wedding abroad that we went to was in August 2011, the weekend before Steve and Hannah's wedding, we were at the wedding of Monika and James in Lodz, Poland. Monika is Polish and this is her hometown so it was really interesting to go there and see where she is from and it was obviously very special to her to get married at home. They had a Catholic wedding service and then a very polish reception with about twelve courses of food, plus a cold buffet, a hot BBQ and copious amounts of vodka. There was a bottle of vodka in the ice bucket on the table at the wedding breakfast instead of wine! There was even a song that if anyone started singing it then everyone had to join in and then down a shot of vodka at the end after the shout of "Na zdrowie!" The best translation to this I can find is "For health" and I apologise profusely to Monika if I have got that all completely wrong. One of what I would consider the most personal touches of the wedding was the readings at the service. I was honoured to be asked to deliver one of the readings in English and I followed Monika's aunt who had read the same passage in Polish. This also happened with the second reading which was sung in Polish and read in English.
You get the idea now of what comes next:
The most recent wedding we have been to was of one of my closest friends at work, Laura and Paul. They had civil ceremony in a beautiful hotel followed by a reception in one of the very grand rooms. One of the most special things about the ceremony was the fact that Laura's friend read a poem that her Mum had written for them. It was a beautiful piece of writing and extremely personal to the happy couple. I have not come across this before, where the reading has been written by a family member. Again, all the stationary was designed and created by the couple and the theme of butterflies and the colour blue that ran through everything was personal to Laura and Paul. All the tables were named after places they have been to and the table signs were photos of them together in those places. The wedding favours were wine glass charms that we were encouraged to make use of during the meal. We were at the Paris table and our wine glass charms were little Eiffel Towers. These are so cute and have been used on several occasions since then at home.
Here you go:
Still to go this year we have two weddings in December and we have already got three lined up for 2013. I am sure every single one of them will be special and unique and a wonderful day.
(All photos reproduced with very kind permission of the brides in question. Thank you very much Hannah, Anastasia, Monika and Laura.)
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