Anna & Mike’s Eff It Wedding

I’m wildly excited to share Anna’s wedding story with you. It’s one of the coolest things that’s landed in my inbox for awhile, period. This story somehow 100% captures what getting married felt like to me, and what I learned while I was planning our wedding. I could go on and on, but instead maybe I should just give you Anna:We got married on August 15th, and had planned a awesome BBQ picnic on a ranch in a meadow by a lake in the Colorado mountains. Think ribs, potato salad, home-brewed beer & apple pie, followed by an epic dance party. Nice, right?

I say “had planned” and “supposed to” because all that didn’t actually happen. Why? Well, two hours before the ceremony was set to start, it began raining. Then an hour later the temperature dropped to 37 degrees and it started hailing. Did we have a Plan B? Nope. We’d planned pretty much everything EXCEPT a Plan B because it’s usually 95 degrees and hot as h-e-double-hockey-sticks during this time of year. Snow? That wasn’t on our wedding radar. No way, no sir.
So. Our guests were set to arrive in 15 minutes, and as Mike and I watched torrential rain blow chairs over and tablecloths away, we let go of the wedding we’d worked to plan for so many months. We decided to move the whole shindig up the hill to an old barn, and hoped for the best. The most important thing was that we got married that day, and we were going to DO IT or ELSE.

But here is where things got good. Here is when our wedding actually happened. Because when the guests arrived and saw us – wearing jeans & rain slickers — moving food, supplies and tables up a muddy hill in the rain, they got to work. They created an assembly line to get chairs up to the 2nd floor of the barn for the ceremony. Mike’s brother brought the car over and started bumping Michael Jackson. The caterers moved all their equipment inside, set up the bar, and started passing whiskey around to warm everyone up. People hung lights, lit candles, and set jars of flowers (that were supposed to be for the tables) up all over the place.

And look what they did: rad, right?! Mike got dressed in his truck, and I got dressed in a horse stall. We didn’t use the tent we’d rented. Or the tables. And most of the plates/cups/dishes didn’t even get unpacked from their boxes. My dress (which I made), had 6 inches of mud on the hem. Ceremony programs? Didn’t happen. The table runners that Mike sewed? Forget it. But did we get married? Heck yeah! And did we have a good time? Absolutely! I’ll remember everyone laughing, helping and pitching in as some of the most wonderful moments of my life. Despite the rain and the mud and the cold, everyone had an amazing time. Mike and I feel that our wedding was so much more meaningful and fabulous than we ever could have planned or imagined, because the people we love most in the world came together and literally helped us get married. We couldn’t have done it without them. And the epic dance party? That totally happened. The little guys got it started off right with the “Bare Necessities,” and we closed it down at midnight with George Michael’s “Faith.” Cause that’s how we roll. I think it’s actually pretty cool that the universe rained on our wedding par
ade. It encouraged me to let go, to sit back and focus on what was REALLY happening – that all our favorite people were together in one place, & that I was promising to spend the rest of my life with my very best friend. At that moment I was able to see that things couldn’t possibly go wrong, because the most important stuff was so very right. And that’s all that mattered. All our pictures were taken by the lovely, fun, friendly and awesomely-talented Traci Griffin & her incredibly fabulous assistant Molly Watson. These two are photographer ninjas: everywhere all at once, capturing everything without being noticed, and making the whole event look magical. We have major crushes on them.

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