Every so often, a wedding graduate post has a line that just GRABS me, hard. And with Shana, it was this, "If you think this could never happen with your family and friends, neither did we. It could. Create it." She goes on to say that you can't expect it to be easy, but you can do it. And for me, that's everything I think about life, and APW, and families, and all of it. Do you need it in a soul deep way? Than stop complaining that it doesn't exist and create it. Add to that the way Shana laid the foundation for her wedding, and you have a woman so wise that I stand in awe of her. Shana, honey? Next time you're in San Francisco? Drinks are on me.

Our wedding, like our marriage, had a strong foundation. A year ago before deciding anything else, I sat down with my cousin and a notebook and we created the wedding from the deepest roots. We began by imagining what we wanted each individual person to get out of being there.

At the top of the list was our grandmother. We imagined her beaming proudly as she sat back and took it all in, surrounded by the family she was responsible for and overflowing with a profound sense of how loved and appreciated she is. She passed away in January, eight months before the wedding, but I know she had that knowledge with her when she went. As for everyone else, I think they got it too.

These were the important things. Once Morgan and I were aware of how staggeringly awesome our community was, the roots were in place, and this determined the whole outlook of the wedding. “Do we care if this happens? Is it important to have that?” Our answer: only if it will contribute to what people get out of this day. The centerpieces, the décor, and the details were more important to our awesome Martha-Stewart /Bob-Vila relatives than they were to us, so we enlisted their creative energies and focused our attention elsewhere. Someone would say, “This will look nice, and I’ll have fun making it. Can I?” Yes! So what if we never used the gold spray-paint I bought to decorate rocks and sticks? The whole thing was beyond beautiful in the end, and way better than anything I would have come up with.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Shana & Morgan

More wedding graduates! Hooray! Melissa's wedding graduate post has been a long time in the making (by which I mean it's languished in my inbox for a long long time, and for that, I'm sorry). What really struck me about Melissa's post, is how she talks about finally discussing, and understanding, what both she and her partner want out of their wedding day. The way they untangle what's expected of them, and what they are dreaming of, and put it into words and values, is perhaps the way all of us should start wedding planning. Really understanding our needs, making a wedding mission statement of sorts... well, I'm not going to say it will save you tears and screaming, but it will definitely give you a place to come back to when you've gotten the tears and screaming out of your system (or it did for us, achem). So with that, I'm thrilled to bring you Melissa and her love song to Team Practical:

I knew planning a wedding with my fiance Eric was not going to be an easy feat. I didn’t necessarily need a super traditional wedding, but I wanted a dress, a dance, and flowers. Eric on the other hand wanted a field, beer, and fire. Every wedding related conversation ended with me running upstairs and sobbing into my pillow. Bottom line: I was a girl who lived in a hoodie and jeans, yet I had been socialized (brainwashed) into feeling like I “needed” an over the top wedding. I wanted to sip champagne in a posh dress boutique with my girls without having to worry about a price tag. I wanted to import out of season flowers from Florida. I wanted killer wedding photos that I could gush over for years. We had plenty of money, and I wanted free reign. During the first few months of our engagement, I quickly realized that no matter how many hours I spent crying and stomping me feet, Eric was not going to give in to what I wanted...until I could tell him why I wanted it.

Blogs like APW helped immensely. We started reading them together. I slowed down my wedding porn consumption and started being a little less ridiculous. Eric started to realize that there were people who felt the same way he did about the industry and became a little less angry about the whole thing.  We were in love, we wanted a wedding, and through reading APW, we decided that we needed to actually talk- there was a compromise somewhere and we needed to find it. Finally over our weekly Tuesday night taco dinner we decided to complete a task that we had attempted a handful of times. We both wrote down what elements were important to us, and how much we were willing to spend. This time, after reviewing the list, we went through and asked each other why each of the things was on our respective lists.

Eric learned that I wanted the bonding experience that dress shopping offered, and I learned that Eric wanted late night, laid back fun with his guys.  It wasn’t that he didn’t want a cake or nice flowers, it was just that he would rather spend money on creating an event that celebrated not only us, but also our friends and families. I had always made fun of him for being my Vulcan (nerd alert), but around the dinner table that night, he also revealed to me how important the emotional side of the ceremony was to him. I left dinner touched and amazed by my fiancé.  He wasn’t anti-wedding, he was just anti-wedding that didn’t reflect us and our simple life that we lead. I pulled myself out of the wedding porn world and became determined to somehow create “our” perfect wedding. I took his list, combined with it with mine, took the average of the two budgets and went to work.

Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Melissa & Eric

I've heard a lot of chatter on the world-wide-wed (Ha! Forgive me. I just had a large margarita.) about this indie nonsense of having all your friends do everything for your wedding to keep your budget down. And people say, in all fairness, BUT I DON'T HAVE BAKER/ GRAPHIC DESIGNER/ DRESSMAKER/ EVENT DESIGNER friends. Well. Of course you don't. But here is the thing - there was a day, not so long ago, when the less experienced helped with weddings. Friends helped with flowers because they *liked* flowers and *loved* you. People made you a cake as a gift, a miss-shaped, wonderful, tasty gift. And I think Amy & Bracken's wedding is such a perfect example of that acceptance of love, however un-experienced, from their very own community. So lets take the week out under an arch of flowers:

My husband and I got married in July 2009 in Crested Butte, CO. It was a morning ceremony, with the  reception immediately following. The site we chose was outside, overlooking fields of wildflowers and mountains surrounding us. Three out of 125 guests actually lived in the town. Everyone else (including us) drove or flew in for the weekend. We hosted a Friday night welcome BBQ for everyone. Saturday morning was our ceremony and reception. We also had an impromtu bonfire later that evening and Sunday morning we met at a local park as people were leaving town for last-minute good-byes and extra time to just sit and visit.

The entire experience has been something I find difficult to articulate in words. There was the romance, beauty and absolute rightness of the proposal. Then the first month of letting everything sink in. I was really getting married?

I'd spent years feeling cynical and wary of the whole hoopla and here I was immersed in it... finding myself tempted by pretty colors and expensive trinkets. I heard myself saying words like, "but we have to do this," or "it's a wedding, of course we do it this way." (Luckily, with the help of my fiance, I was able to pull myself back to reality and into the person I was, regaining a more pragmatic perspective.) Continue reading Wedding Graduate: Amy & Bracken