Tradition

Nov 2012

Wedding Graduates: Zen & Cephas, Part II

I know we said a few weeks ago that Elisabeth’s Wedding Grad post would be our last intern grad post for the year, but, well, we lied. Because this week Zen surprised us with a second grad post—this time on her and Cephas’ Malaysian wedding. And I couldn’t be more thrilled. Because secretly, this was the post I’ve been waiting for. (I don’t know about you, but all of Zen’s posts chronicling the mayhem of planning her Malaysian wedding have left me in stitches.) We talk about this a lot here on APW, but Zen’s post reminded me that no two weddings—not even for the same couple—are ever the same. And in the end, this is a very good thing. Because it means that there is no right way to have your wedding, no magical formula to making it the best day ever. So today, as you read Zen’s post, take solace in the fact that the path you’ve chosen is going to be the right one, if only because it’s the one you chose.

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

The pictures we got from our Malaysian wedding are kind of a mess. They’re not carefully composed. The lighting is all over the place. Some of them are blurry. They’re of people moving, milling, talking, eating, drinking, yelling, dancing, running around trying to restrain their tiny offspring. The pictures are like those old Chinese and Indian scroll paintings where everything is happening at once and you don’t know where to look. There is no one focal point.

The way they look is how the wedding felt: chaotic, leisurely, expansive, and warm. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that the Western wedding was about us as a couple and the Asian wedding was about our—well, mostly my—family, but that’s what it felt like. The Malaysian wedding wasn’t terribly romantic—it didn’t particularly feel like a celebration of us and our deathless love. But it felt like coming home. The English wedding had been marvellously, sweetly out of the ordinary course of things; our brief honeymoon in Italy had sustained that sense of being taken out of our everyday lives. The Malaysian wedding was something else.

Cephas, of course, will have felt differently—but for me, getting married at home was what I needed to take me back to reality. It made our marriage real, because it embedded it in the context of my—now our—family.

If the English wedding was a process of focusing in, of centering us and placing us before the altar and enclosing us in a promise between the two of us, the Malaysian wedding was about us stepping out of the focus, pulling back, and seeing where we stood in the pattern made by our family.

So I don’t remember tender moments between me and Cephas at the Malaysian wedding. I remember everyone else. There was my four-year-old cousin who, as the only boy child present, was taken by hand by his father to the bridal suite, promised the rare delight of getting to jump on the bed. (You will recall that this is arranged so that the married couple will have many sons.) He went along cheerfully until he realised that he was being followed by about twenty uncles and aunties wielding cameras, when he baulked.

“Come, boy, don’t you want to jump on the bed?” coaxed his dad.

“Don’t want this bed,” said my cousin, trying to make a speedy exit from the bridal suite. “Want another bed!”

Whereupon my aunt picked him up bodily and dropped him on the bed—but not before another four-year-old cousin, a little girl not remotely afraid of the limelight, had hurled herself onto the bed and starting bouncing, screeching with delight.

There was my mom, who plunged into wedding planning with typical intensity, standing over my aunts with a whip while they made a million fabric loofahs to decorate our house with. She also developed a psychosomatic cough from the stress, and went around rasping about floral arrangements. “Oh Mom, I feel so bad that you’re stressed because of the wedding,” I ventured. “No!” said my mom, coughing. “I’m really happy! I’m coughing because I’m so happy!” Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Zen & Cephas, Part II

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Planning: Journeys, Tradition, Wedding Graduates | 12 Comments »

Nov 2012

The Holiday Talk

Now that we’re officially in the thick of the holiday season (how was everyone’s Thanksgiving?), this week seemed like the perfect time to talk about the tricky beast that is navigating families, both new and old, around the holidays. Because no matter how much time passes in my relationship, the holidays are when forming a baby family feels like the most work. (Seriously, how are we still going to four or five Christmases each year?) And yet, as I’ve written before, there is no time of year I love more. So this week we’re talking about the mess and the joy that comes from blending baby family and family of origin around the holiday table, starting with a post from KB that sums up this time of year with a kind of transitional grace I can only hope to muster one of these days myself.

–Maddie for Maternity Leave

There comes a time in every relationship where you need to have The Talk. Actually, depending on where you are in the relationship, there can be several Talks. The DTR Talk (aka, Defining the Relationship). The Sex Talk (Tested? Birth control? Whips and chains?). The Marriage Talk (Ooh, shiny!). And—The Holiday Talk. Otherwise known as opening negotiations on whether you will spend the holidays with your family or your partner’s. In one conversation, you can potentially establish a pattern for years of shuttling back and forth between families, whether it’s across the street, state, country, or the world.

So far, I have managed to avoid The Talk. My strategy has always been, simply—it’s not happening. We’re not engaged, we’re not married, so you spend the holidays with your family, I will spend the holidays with mine. No drama. No hauling gifts back and forth. No running madly through airports. No strange holiday rituals involving sauerkraut and charades. And, most importantly, no whining from any family member.

Sure, your parents might say, “Oh, so we won’t be seeing your girl/boyfriend for Christmas? That’s such a shame.” Yet you know that the real guilt-trip would rain down if you were the one missing the festivities. As in, “But this could be Grandpa’s last holiday…” And, despite the fact that Grandpa can do more one-armed push-ups than John Cena, you capitulate. However, with his-and-hers holidays, I avoided all that and spent my Oh Holy Nights happily eating Moose Munch on my parents’ couch. Yes, it was lonely at times—but more Moose Munch for me!

It wasn’t until September, roughly six months after my fiancé and I got engaged that I realized that my strategy had now officially expired. We were sitting on the couch and I was watching Ghost Hunters on TV while my fiancé slaughtered dragons (or vampires? elves? I don’t know) on his laptop. Without looking up from his screen, he casually said, “Hey, we should probably get plane tickets soon—I mean, assuming we’re going to Michigan for Christmas.”

Crap. I hummed something non-committal.

As he pumped another magical creature full of lead, he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and quietly said, “You know, we’re going to have to do it sometime.” Continue reading The Holiday Talk

Posted in: Friends & Relations, Reclaiming Wife, Tradition, Wedding Undergraduates | 125 Comments »

Nov 2012

Reclaiming Wife: Our First Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the States. Which means there’s a good chance that plenty of you are half paying attention at what I hope is a shortened day at work before heading away (or staying home) to celebrate the holiday. But before we all go our separate ways for the next few days, APW’s newest staff member, Emily, wanted to take the opportunity to talk about her plans for tomorrow. The funny thing is, her post completely caught me off guard (read: I cried like a baby). Because as Michael and I are about to hop on a flight to shoot one of my last weddings of the year, I’m reminded that sometimes the most special holiday plans are the ones that don’t look anything like the picture we have in our head from our childhood. In fact, maybe when we’re older, these do-what-you-can-with-what-you-have holidays will end up the foundation for what become our most cherished rituals and traditions. And with that, we’ll see you guys next week!

—Maddie for Maternity Leave

This is the first year that I’ll be making Thanksgiving dinner. In my family, this is a huge deal, and not one that I thought I’d be taking on so soon. I imagined it happening when I was in my thirties, with a big house that was mine and all of my relatives flying in wearing striped scarves and pulling matching black suitcases. And one of those dogs running around like in all those black and white movies my family loves to watch, although I’m not sure our cats would be too pleased about that. And probably one of our hypothetical future children running around with a cute bow in her hair, because in my family, baby-making comes before hosting duties.

So it’s a bit foreign to me that I’ll be making Thanksgiving dinner for two, just me and Ian, in our one-bedroom apartment. Where’s my perfectly tied apron? My holiday china? My cousins on the couch watching football? Nowhere to be found. (I looked!) My grandmother is in Texas, my mother will be in California, and my Kenyan husband, who could really care less about Thanksgiving, will be working until 6:00 that night.

The first Thanksgiving that I’m at the helm of is falling short of what I always imagined, and yet I couldn’t be happier. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Our First Thanksgiving

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, Tradition | 50 Comments »

Jul 2012

Zen: Embracing the Nonsense

I’m at the age when pictures of the weddings of friends and friends of friends are almost a daily feature on my Facebook feed. I was looking through some of these recently when it hit me—that all too common feeling that strikes the planners of weddings and followers of wedding blogs. I wanted someone else’s wedding.

The bride and groom, acquaintances from university, had planned their wedding in about four months. It was the simplest of simple weddings—it took place in an undecorated hall; the bride wore a red cheongsam and a tiny white birdcage veil; there was a desserts table laden with homemade cakes baked by loving friends, some of whom had flown in at short notice from distant places to be there. At the end of the day the bride and groom put on their helmets and departed on bicycles.

I don’t envy huge frilly weddings, as much as I enjoy attending and looking at pictures of them. It’s the simple ones that make me side-eye our plans for a bi-continental, guest-list-in-the-hundreds, two-week wedstravaganza. Oh, to have had the boldness to be simple! I say to myself. Why didn’t I have a bare-bones ceremony at the registrar’s office, followed by an unfussy meal at a local restaurant attended only by close family and friends? How did I end up entangled in the sort of event that requires me to know how to pronounce “boutonnière”?

Planning not only one but two traditional weddings seems to me to involve a lot of pure nonsense. There are all sorts of things I figured were optional—the veil, the traditional long white wedding dress, the tiered cake, the specially hired fancy wedding car, being escorted down the aisle by my dad. I think of wedding traditions as comprising two types—”stuff you’ve just made up” and “actual traditions”—and it seemed obvious to me that these were all the former rather than the latter. I was happy to jettison them.

Except, turns out, the wedding’s not just about me and what I’d like to jettison. It’s also about a lot of other people whom I’m rather fond of, and who have strong feelings on all the things I’d like to jettison. What I think of as “stuff you’ve just made up” might be a really vital tradition to people I love, such that they’d feel something was missing if you had a wedding without it.

I suppose the alternative wedding blog party line would be: “It’s your day—do what you want!” But I’ve had a lot of wants to do with the wedding, some of which were totally random and ultimately fleeting (*cough* elephant topiary *cough*), and some of which have caused squabbles and sobbing. What I need, though, and the whole reason I’m going through with the thing in the first place, is simple. Continue reading Zen: Embracing the Nonsense

Posted in: Dilemmas, Friends & Relations, Planning, Planning: Journeys, Tradition | 26 Comments »

Jun 2012

Having Faith

This afternoon’s post is about an issue I know very well: the curveball of falling for someone outside your religion, and having to negotiate the fraught cultural waters of making two backgrounds mesh into one family and one wedding. And like Stephanie and Dan, David and I both came to the table as fairly religious, practicing in our own religions. There are, of course, as many compromises and solutions as there are couples. Ours involved conversion (though the real solution will take a lifetime and as many words to describe). Stephanie’s and Dan’s involves two religions. And when there are two religions and one wedding, finding an officiant is difficult (heck, when there are one religion and two families, finding the right officiant can be difficult). And of course, as with most difficult things, the learning process is a powerful one. So here is Stephanie to discuss how they’re dealing with finding a solution.

Dan and I knew each other for two years as just friends. We played outfield together on a co-ed office softball team, me in left field and him in center. Two kids raised 1000 miles apart, who grew up wanting to be astronauts and came to Houston to work for the space program. We were brought together by mutual friends, the same dream job, and chance.

Two years ago I was dumped by my ex and devastated. So I went to J-date. That’s where nice Jewish girls go if they want to find a Jewish husband, or so I’ve heard. I met a few nice boys but nothing clicked. Softball season started back up again, and there he was. My friend Dan. My really cute friend Dan. My really cute, Catholic friend Dan. Whoops.

In Jewish mysticism there is a concept of soulmates. G-d takes a soul and divides it in two. Each half is sent down to earth in a separate body, and their goal is to find each other and become one complete soul. Sometimes this doesn’t happen right away and the souls have to try again. In Hebrew the concept is called beshert, both a noun meaning soulmate and an adjective describing something as meant to be. Dan and I were drawn together by the universe, by destiny, by a higher power. Our finding each other was beshert.

Dan and I are different from most interfaith couples, because both of us are fairly religious. We aren’t a cultural Jew and an occasional Catholic; we both practice, we both believe. We knew it was important, so we discussed and decided on how we would raise our children before we even knew we’d be marrying each other. Though a difficult conversation, we arrived at our decision without much conflict. Until the wedding planning started. Continue reading Having Faith

Posted in: Planning, Planning, The Hard Stuff, Tradition, Wedding Undergraduates | 82 Comments »

Jun 2012

Zen: The Indolent Engaged Person’s Manifesto

If I were a wedding magazine editor, I’d have a feature on What Every Engaged Person Needs When Planning Their Wedding. (My magazine would not refer to brides, since in a wedding usually more than one person gets married, and often the couple is not exclusively female. It would use a time-honoured gender-neutral pronoun when speaking of people in the third person. It would sell five copies, all of them to my mother.)

Top of my list of The Engaged Person’s Essentials would be “indolence.”

Being an epically lazy person is very helpful in countering the mind-control rays emitted by the WIC. More than once, in the course of my obsessive perusal of wedding literature, I’ve come across some charming idea—a decorative elephant made of flowers, for example, or paper lanterns that look like owls. I’ve sat bolt upright in my chair and said, “I must have it.” I’ve spent hours googling elephant-shaped topiary frames.

Then I usually went to bed and woke up the next morning and reflected, “I could buy that topiary frame for £50 and spend the next six months stabbing myself with gardening shears while perched on a throne of floral foam—or I could forget the whole shebang, get a cup of coffee, and read some shoujo manga.”

It’s a delightful way to spend a year and a half planning a wedding. And you get the best of all worlds. When someone asks you to sign up for a 10 km run or collaborate in a limerick chapbook, you have the excellent excuse that you’re too busy working on your wedding. And you totally mean it! You totally are going to fold those 1,000 paper cranes using only scanned copies of you and your affianced’s childhood photos! Except then you get home, realise your favourite “chilled out bride marries charmingly disorganised Bajan dude” episode of Don’t Tell The Bride is on, and decide that nobody would really have noticed the cranes anyway. Continue reading Zen: The Indolent Engaged Person’s Manifesto

Posted in: Planning, Planning, Planning: Journeys, The Ceremony, The Day Itself, Tradition | 25 Comments »