Dress, Given IX

What could be a better way to end the week than a Sisterhood of the Traveling Dress giveaway, right? RIGHT. I mean, we’re all crying from the last two days of posting, but now we can start the weekend happy-crying, which is an improvement.

Robin sobbed over picking the next recipient of her dress, and told me she wanted to rip the dress into little pieces and give a little bit to everyone. At which point I made a King-Solomon-And-The-Baby joke, and told her to find me the real owner of the dress. She said she had that coming.

But she DID finally pick, and she picked Allison T, who said:

Hi! I started reading APW about a month before my sweet fiance and I were actually engaged (in June) and this site has really helped me frame the importance of the engagement time. I was engaged ten years ago, but that wedding never happened (called off two weeks before the date). And that engagement was all about planning a wedding, but nothing at all about planning a marriage and life together.

When I accepted my fiance’s proposal, I knew that I wanted our wedding to be different than my previous experience (understandably!) with the focus being on us and our life together and the friends and family who will be helping and supporting us in our life together. We sat down and made separate lists of what we wanted the wedding day to be like and at the top of both of our lists was that the other person is happy with the day. At the end of the day we will be married. The details will come together and I am hoping that this dress giveaway is one of those details!

I started reading APW for the bridal ideas but then figured out that this site is not really about bridal ideas, it’s about marriage ideas. And I love this site for that reason. Don’t get me wrong, I love to see the pictures because weddings are so much the same (bringing together people to share in love) and so different (seeing all those fabulous styles that I could never pull off) (Editors note: DON’T SAY THAT! You can pull off whatever you wanna!). But the beauty of this site is community and support of (all) marriages.

I am not so fortunate to live in a large metropolitan area with lots of APW readers. Although I hope I am not the only reader from way down south in Alabama. I do appreciate the online community on this forum and the focus on the marriage rather than just the wedding. I think that the sharing of the wedding dress is really a sweet way to pass along the good feelings of the special day.

I love Robin’s dress and I really can’t believe that I am 5′3′ and the same size. I have read comments during past dress giveaways and thought, “How can they be exactly the right size?” And here I am, all 5′3″ of me saying “I am the exact size!” I dread dress shopping and this dress would be a gift to save me from that task! I am looking forward to marriage, but not some of the wedding day details like dress shopping.

Robin is an absolutely beautiful bride and the bride lucky enough to wear the dress next will be too — but not because of the dress, because of the spirit of the dress. Thank you for being nice, Robin, and thanks for considering me to possibly wear your beautiful dress when I see my fiance on our wedding day. Best wishes to you and new family!

Allison

P.S. I love that there is a stain on the dress so that “I” would not the be the one to get a stain on the dress! Yet another burden would be lifted!

So, Allison, email me!

And everyone else, go run over to Facebook and catch up on your APW Book Club meetup. Or, if you’re not going to a physical meetup, buy the book and read it. I’ll announce all the meetup locations on the site next week, and then we’ll discuss online the week after (rubs hands together with glee).

Happy weekend, ladies, and happy Halloween. COCKTAIL TIME!

Ask Team Practical: Honoring Lost Loved Ones

It’s Friday, so you know what that means! It’s Ask Team Practical with Alyssa. We kicked off this series with the two easiest, least controversial posts we could think of – sober weddings and thank you notes. What was there to discuss, we said? Well, lots, apparently. 300 comments worth of lots, both times. So now that Alyssa has had her trial by fire, we’re kicking it up a notch. Today we’re tackling honoring a loved one at your wedding. Which. We’ll see how it goes. I suspect you’ll have a lot of wise things to say.

APW is an important community because we readers support each other. Even when we disagree, we’re there to lend a hand when needed. Meg wanted to start Ask Team Practical in order to provide an even bigger outlet for that support system, but we both knew that there would be questions that neither she nor I would be able to provide enough of an answer for, and today is one of those days.

J. and Renee both wrote in regarding honoring a loved one who has passed in your wedding ceremony or reception, and we thought tackling this after Tina’s heartbreakingly eloquent post yesterday was perfect timing. J. is a wedding planner and she and her two other siblings tragically lost their sister three years ago.

“While I am not currently engaged, I want to begin thinking about creative unique ways to include the memory of her in my wedding party/ceremony. She was my best friend and would have been my maid of honor.”

Renee and her fiancé both lost a parent early.

“My father died of cancer 4 years ago, about a year before he and I met. One of the many things that was hard to reconcile during my dad’s illness and after he died was the knowledge that my dad wouldn’t be there at my wedding, wouldn’t be able to meet my children, you get the idea. My fiancé has also lost a parent, his mother, who died of cancer when he was just a little baby. So of course he wishes his mother could be there, but he doesn’t remember her at all and does not dwell on it. He understands when I have my sad moments at weddings, but we don’t want me to be sad at OUR wedding. I want to find a way to honor both my father and his mother, without it being something that I have to actively *do* on my wedding day. ”

These questions are way bigger than me and something I can’t answer with any sense of authority. However, reader Morgan (who wrote this beautiful post on weddings in the face of death) and Tina are more than qualified to offer up some advice.

Morgan offers up this:

First and foremost, your wedding day should be a day of joy, of celebration. It’s not a day of memorial, or a wake, and I think it’s important not to let sadness* or memorial activities fall too heavily on the day. Remember those who you have lost, but do not let them become more important than the wedding. I have every day to miss my father (and my grandparents and so on) but only one day to get married. Read More…