Our ceremony was as perfect as I’d hoped, but having said that, one of the things that made it so wonderful for me were the parts I didn’t plan. (And believe me there was a lot of planning). These unexpected elements gave us both something extra, something special.
The night before our wedding, a colony of small yellow beetles hatched in the tree. The size and shape of ladybeetles but plain yellow, there weren’t swarms, just a tiny yellow companion for every second guest; little brooches of sunshine. I thought it was kind of delightful, a showering of good luck… Natures confetti.
They seemed to fly away right after the ceremony, carried away on the breeze.
Being music lovers, music was always going to be an important element to include. Lucky for us lots of our friends are musicians! This was another of the lovely surprises, because even though we knew what they were going to play, we didn’t hear them actually play the songs until the ceremony.
It’s funny, going into the day I had no idea of what to expect my emotions to do. All the photo’s of me walking down the aisle show the most ridiculously giant smile ever, waving and saying hi to all our friends, completely ungraceful. I got through everything with a big smile, but when our friends performed one of the songs for us I lost it. That’s when the tears started to roll. I knew everything we were going to say during the ceremony, but the music was the spontaneous part. It was SO beautiful and really touched me!
We had a friend play an instrumental version of Song to the Siren by Tim Buckley on guitar as I walked down the aisle. (But he changed the key to make it more joyful).
(Video here... you have to watch the stupid Ad first).
Our friends performed a song during the ceremony. "Lay and Love" by Bonnie Prince Billy was the song, but we re-wrote the final verse to make it happier and personalise it to us, and changed the chorus to "stand here and love you". They also sped it up a little and performed it with great joyousness.
Then at the end while we were signing the register, our rock-star friend got up and played our little “La Vie en Rose” wind up music box. That got a bit of a laugh from the crowd. :D
We asked each guest to bring a flower to the wedding, but did not tell them why (a surprise for them). As they arrived our celebrant asked them to come forward and form a circle with their flowers, giving each bloom a “well wish” for us as they did so. I had expected small wildflowers off the sides of the roads, but being Spring all the giant blooms were out and one of the great surprises of the day for us was how bold and bright the circle was. Alongside the giant spring flowers were handcrafted paper flowers, fabric flowers, and origami bouquets… all in a perfect circle. I knew it was happening, but the result was so much more impressive than I ever imagined, it took my breath away.
A friend told me later that it looked as though they had all sprouted out of the ground, bloomed naturally in a circle.
We were married inside the ring of flowers.
We didn’t want a bridal party but we had the opportunity to make two special little girls in our lives very happy. So we had two flower girls. Actually we had a flowergirl each. Mr You had his niece standing outside with him, and I had our God-Daughter walk down the aisle in front of me (pretty little sweet peas of moral support). Our niece was a “real” flowergirl in the sense that it was her duty to hand out the flowers from her giant bouquet to anyone who had forgotten to bring a flower for the circle.
Although no-one forgot to bring a flower themselves (wow!), our guests enjoyed it so much, that by the time I got out there the flowergirl was holding nothing but a big leaf! To some people this may sound a bit sad for the flowergirl, to me it was SO beautiful, and she was as pleased as punch!
While we didn’t have a bridal party, we included each member of our family in some way during the day. Mr You’s sisters were MC and witness, and my sister carried our ring nest, presenting it to us during the ceremony.
(I made a nest out of twigs from our garden: Something to represent our home while at Mr You’s parent’s home. There were lots of handmade things, but I’ll get to that later.)
Speaking of handmade, our brilliant celebrant made us a keepsake book of our ceremony. She handmade the cover using a piece of embossed paper made by her nieces (who are amazing paper artists), a piece of antique lace from her Grandmother's collection, and she embroidered our initials on a ribbon from her personal stash! Lots of lovely surprises that day, lots I tell you!
I have no Grandparents around anymore, but to include them we used little old books that once belonged to my Grandma. We pasted our vows inside the books, and my Mum presented Grandma’s books to us to read our vows from during the ceremony.
These were one of the “something old” items on our day. I say “one of” because there were lots… more on that later too.
