The Ceremony
Lafayette Park
We wanted an outdoor ceremony and if the weather cooperates we'll say our vows in front of the lake in historic Lafayette Park. The park is located in Lafayette Square, a St. Louis neighborhood full of French "painted ladies" from the late 1800's, that has undergone a major restoration in the last several years. The neighborhood and the park make you feel as if you've stepped into another era.
Although Lafayette Park is not the largest park in St. Louis, or is it the most beautiful or pristine, it has a certain charm that captured our attention and ultimately made us want to hold the ceremony there. Lafayette Park is the oldest park in St. Louis and throughout the years has seen everything from tornado devastation in the late 1800's to a neighborhood campaign to save its wrought iron fence from scrap during World War II. Although, the park fell into decline after WWII, in recent years there has been a large effort to restore the park, as well as the surrounding neighborhood, to its former Victorian glory. On a weekend afternoon you can feed the swans, watch a vintage baseball game, or simply enjoy the gardens planted by neighborhood volunteers.
Ceremony Details
Neither of us is Jewish, but we would like to incorporate a tradition used in Jewish weddings: the huppah, or bridal canopy. Not only does it have wonderful symbolism, but it will create a pretty backdrop/altar area for our ceremony since we're getting married outdoors. My mom does fabric painting for quilts and such, so she will be creating our canopy fabric. Here are some inspiration photos:
What are we going to do with the canopy after the wedding? We've decided to shake up the old guest book a bit. My mom is also going to create a piece of fabric that our guests will sign in place of a traditional guest book. After the wedding she'll take the fabric guest book and use it as a quilt topper, take the fabric from the canopy and use it as a backing, and quilt the two pieces together to make our very own family heirloom quilt! Here's my inspiration for the piece our guests would sign:
Initially, I really liked the ceremony decor shown below, but we will not be doing this now. I think we're just going to have the canopy, flower buckets hanging from the chairs, an aisle runner, and guestbook table.
Handfasting Ceremony
A handfasting is a traditional betrothal or wedding ceremony practiced in Europe, especially Scotland. This gesture seems to have been derived from one of the ancient images of male and female union, the infinity sign, or figure eight. The infinity sign signifies completeness as it is composed of a male, clockwise circle and a female, counterclockwise circle. Since neither circle lies above the other, the infinity sign implies equality between the male and female. The act of handfasting is where our modern-day expression "to tie the knot" comes from.
I've seen handfasting ceremonies a lot while reading wedding blogs and I really like the idea. We will be incorporating this act as well as text that is traditionally said during a "hand ceremony" (which is somewhat different) as Mrs. Cherry Pie did in her wedding blogged on Weddingbee.
I purchased a length of eggplant-colored cording from Joann's Fabrics (as typically seen in window covering trims) and our best man will be tying the cord around our hands as our officiant reads the ceremony text.
Ring-Warming Ceremony
A ring-warming is a very new idea that I ran across during the course of our wedding planning. Since it is so new, there wasn't a lot of information about the logistics of such a ceremony, so we had to base what we're going to do on the few references we were able to find online.
This is the text we will put in our programs to explain the ring-warming:
"A ring-warming is a relatively new tradition included in wedding ceremonies. Just before we exchange wedding rings, the rings will be passed to each of our guests. Each guest will briefly hold the rings and silently "warm" them with his or her blessing, prayers, and wishes for our marriage. When it is time for us to exchange rings, the rings will have been warmed by the love and support of our family and friends."
We purchased a ring bowl from Paloma's Nest to which we will have the rings securely attached. Just before the ring exchange, we'll have two of the groomsmen help pass the ring bowl from row to row, as ushers do during a church offertory. This should help speed along the process of passing the rings to each and every guest. We're hoping it won't take too long as we are only having about 75 guests. We're planning on playing the song "The Luckiest" by Ben Folds (a favorite!) during the ring-warming. We'll also have a second song (an instrumental piece) to play afterward in case the ceremony takes longer than the 4 minutes and 45 second length of "The Luckiest."
**Post-wedding Update: I think the ring-warming went pretty well according to our plan. I think since this is something new and none of our guests had seen it done before, not many people "got " it. Even though we had the above explanation printed in our programs and our officiant also gave a brief explanation immediately prior to passing the rings, most of our guests simply passed the ring bowl to each other and didn't even touch our rings. The main concern we had prior to the wedding was the warming ceremony taking a long time. But since most of our guests just passed the bowl to each other and didn't hold the rings, it actually went a LOT faster than we had planned and was over before "The Luckiest" had even finished playing! We ended up having about 55 guests participate in the ring-warming (excluding our bridal party and ourselves) and the warming took almost exactly three minutes to complete. We had to end our song earlier than I had wanted, because there was still a minute and forty seconds left, which is a long time when you're just standing up in front of people! But it worked out pretty well for the most part. If you're planning on incorporating a non-traditional element into your ceremony, definitely plan on being flexible! Your guests won't always know what to do when confronted with something new like this. All in all, I'm glad we chose to include the ring-warming. I had several people tell me that they thought it was a very sweet and meaningful idea.
Building Our Canopy
I found French copper buckets at Joann's that I fell in love with and we decided to use them as the base of our canopy. Based on a google search of chuppah building instructions, we decided to use concrete in the buckets to support the poles of our canopy. After an evening at Lowe's, we came home with four ten-foot pieces of 1/2 inch copper tubing (found in the plumbing section), a piece of 5/8 inch PVC pipe, copper end caps for the tubing, eye hooks to screw into the copper caps, and two 50 lb. bags of quickset cement.
We cut the copper tubing to 90 inches in length after discussing how tall we wanted our canopy to be. FI drilled a hole into the side of the copper caps, put the eye hooks through the hole, and then put the caps on the top end of the poles. The canopy fabric will be attached to the poles with ribbons in each corner. The eye hooks will act as a loop to thread the ribbon through and then tie onto. Then we cut the PVC pipe into small enough pieces so that they would fit into the bucket and not be seen. FI, being an engineer, spent some time finding the exact center of each bucket, and used duct tape to secure the PVC pipe into the center. Then we took each copper tubing length, stood it up in the bucket to check for straightness, and adjusted the tape as needed. We made sure to number each bucket and pole so we could match them up together later, and then poured each bucket about two thirds full with the quickset cement. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pics of us putting the cement in the buckets. It was a bit of a rough day as we didn't really know what we were doing- we had never used concrete mix before and once we got the buckets filled it didn't seem to be working too well. The water just seemed to sit on top of the sand and rocks in the concrete mix. However, several hours later the mix finally absorbed all the water and the concrete set up. We ended up using about one and a half bags of the cement.
I went to Joann's and Michael's and bought styrofoam disks that fit the diameter of the buckets and a couple packages of sheet moss. FI helped me trim the styrofoam to fit in the buckets exactly, and also cut out a circle in the middle for the pole to go through. Then I hot glued the moss onto the styrofoam and put the disk down into the bucket to hide the concrete and PVC pipe.
**Post-wedding Update: Six days before the wedding we did a test run to see how the canopy would function- it didn't. The fabric canopy turned out to be too much weight for the metal structure, and even the slightest breeze made the buckets tip over and fall down. We made an emergency trip to Lowe's for more copper tubing, PVC connectors (also in the plumbing section), and copper spray paint meant for plastic. We cut the tubing down to 90 inch lengths and painted the PVC connectors copper to match the poles. The connectors fit onto the top of each pole, and the new tubing we bought was also connected so that it ran parallel to the ground and created a square frame at the top of the canopy. Since the piece of fabric was exactly 90 inches square, we made all of the poles the same length so that the fabric would not droop very much. We were a little nervous about it working out alright, but it looked perfect on the wedding day and it stood perfectly even with a good breeze! You can see a picture of the finished canopy here.
The Ceremony Text
Since we're having a friend officiate our ceremony, we decided to write the ceremony ourselves. We used the book The Wedding Ceremony Planner: the essential guide to the most important part of your wedding day by Rev. Judith Johnson, PhD as the major tool in creating our wedding ceremony. For the handfasting ceremony we used the text that Kat and Justin used in their wedding ceremony, as mentioned above. Our vows we wrote ourselves and got the general outline from Sara and Matt of 2000 Dollar Wedding. For the first half of our vows we wrote our own and kept them secret until the ceremony. We wrote five reasons we love each other in this format: "I love you because..." Then, for the second half of our vows we made the same promises to each other beginning with "Because I love you..." For the second part we took pieces that we like from several sets of vows in the above book, and put them together into something we liked as a whole. Here are my vows to John:
"John, I love you because you always see the very best in me, even when I can't.
I love you because you are one of the most thoughtful and generous people I know. You do things like come up to my office building on snowy days and scrape the snow off my car so I don't have to.
I love you because you always want to fix things and make them better, whether it's a friend's TV or a loved one's problems.
I love you because you haven't lost your childlike innocence. You remind me to get excited about things like Halloween costumes and amusement park rides.
I love you because you're my best friend. We play together, laugh together, create together, go on adventures together. There is no one I'd rather spend the rest of my life with."
And here are the vows we will both say to each other:
"John, because I love you, I choose you
in the presence of our friends and families,
to be my husband and partner,
from this day forward;
I promise to love and respect you,
and to be a calm and safe haven in your life.
I will be your confidant and companion,
your biggest fan and kindest critic,
your co-conspirator and partner in adventure,
your dinner companion and
your reason for getting up in the morning.
I promise to listen deeply when you speak,
to comfort you with my gentleness,
and uphold you with my strength,
to weigh the effects of the words I speak
and the things I do,
to never take you for granted,
and to always give thanks
for your presence in my life."
If you're interested in reading our entire ceremony, below is our ceremony text:
weddingceremonyscript_10-2-09.doc | |
File Size: | 49 kb |
File Type: | doc |