Weddings
Go REALLY green with your wedding invitations
Posted by Sara.
With ecological awareness finally becoming a more mainstream concern, many companies are finding new, unique ways to let you trade your green for unique “green” items. Continue reading »
Weddings | Comment (0)Details, details
Posted by Marielle.
Venue: check!
Yesterday we laid down the non-refundable deposit on our wedding venue. A watermarked slip of paper passed from account holder to vendor officially dictates that on September 13, 2009, I will be marrying my beau at a restored colonial farmhouse in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
Weddings | Comment (0)Wedding Dreams Deferred
Posted by Marielle.
Above all, I had wanted to keep it simple. No, that’s a lie. If I had wanted a relaxed, effortless wedding, I would not have strived so hard to be unique. I never thought I would have to give up one to achieve the other.
In 2005 and again in May, I watched both my older sisters get married at the same hotel, with the same traditional series of events, and most of the same guests. I knew that if my parents had their way, they’d be giving me away at that hotel, too, in a tried and true template ceremony created by my mother when her first daughter stepped up to the nuptial plate at the tender age of 26.
Weddings | Comment (0)Watching life go back to normal
Posted by Marielle.
I have a secret to confess. I’ve been using my friend D. for her wedding. She’s a kind, spiritual and fun person. We’ve been friends since high school and although we’ve never agreed on religion or politics (and probably never will), we have always managed to focus on our shared love of things like sewing projects and the BBC mini-series of Pride & Prejudice.
However, when she got engaged last year, our friendship came to serve me in new ways… soon, we began to bond over weddings. I lent her my copy DIY Bride, made myself available for wedding planning pep-talks, and agonized for days over the proper meter when she assigned me Shakespeare to read at her wedding.
Weddings | Comment (0)Gripe on third-party selling
Posted by Marielle.
So two posts back, I was praising David’s Bridal for giving me a boutique experience when shopping for my wedding gown. It took less than a week for them to destroy the image that they worked so hard to build. I’m talking about David’s Bridal selling your information — your personal phone number, your e-mail address, your home address — to third-party wedding-related companies. This problem was compounded when I made the mistake of signing up for The Great Bridal Expo. In the end, I didn’t attend the event, but that didn’t stop their vendors from latching onto my contact info. Soon my phone was flooded with calls from mysterious 800 numbers and my inbox was drowning in spam e-mails so annoying that they would offend the creator of even the thorniest bridal diet Facebook ads.
Weddings | Comment (0)Meeting Midway: 5 Tips for Sanity When Planning with Mom
Posted by Marielle.
Hello, all! First off, I’d like to apologize for my blogging delinquency. I’d like to say I was busy saving lives or campaigning for Barack Obama (same thing?), but I was tied up only by typical day-to-day life…changing jobs, planning a wedding, and playing Lego Batman for Wii, which has to be the cutest freaking game I’ve played since Kingdom Hearts came out.
But back to weddings, I’d like to take today to talk about navigating a minefield I think many brides have in common — their mothers.
Weddings | Comment (0)Remember the other “special lady”
Posted by Sara.
In this day and age, people are no longer doing things in the same order they did before. Lots of women are waiting to marry later in life, and many of those women already have children. My friend always jokes that she did things “in the wrong order,” but I don’t think it’s “wrong,” I just think it’s modified from what we were taught to believe we had to do.
From what she’s shared with me, my friend’s experience with wedding planning has been even more exciting (and also, even more difficult at times), because she can include her 7-year old daughter in her special day. And her daughter is THRILLED at the prospect of wearing a pretty dress and having her hair done very fancy, and very much like her mommy’s.
Weddings | Comment (0)the “b-word” is the other “c-word”
Posted by Sara.
I have pretty much accepted that weddings cost money, if you choose to go the more “traditional” route. Do I think it’s fair? No, not necessarily, but at the same time, I’m also so sick and tired of hearing people talk about the commercialism of weddings, that weddings are this huge extravaganza and they’re over the top and indulgent. I’m tired of feeling like I have to apologize or be embarrassed because we had a wedding with a larger guest list, at a nice reception hall, and that I wore a pretty (albeit NOT poofy) ivory dress and veil.
Here’s the thing: no shit weddings are extravagant and over-the-top. In most places, this has been the norm since the beginning of time. All cultures have some strange fanfare or ritual tied to marriage, whether it be used as a very elaborate handshake between two businessmen (”you give me your pretty daughter and I’ll give you 100 acres of prime land”), or as a way for a man to celebrate his conquest of his virginal property (”bring out the wedding night bedsheets for all to see!”), and when you put it in the perspective of the ways marriage has been treated in the past, it’s not all that bad.
Do I agree with the attitudes of a lot of brides getting married now? Not necessarily. But the thing is, I don’t think it’s just the white dress that’s making these girls superficial.
Weddings | Comments (3)Empire State Building, anyone…?
Posted by Sara.
After stopping at my building’s convenience store to pick up a Snapple, I was amused by the latest fact I’ve learned from the cap: on Valentine’s Day, there is no charge to get married in the Empire State Building’s Chapel.
I thought this was interesting, for a number of reasons:
1) I never knew people got married at the Empire State building.
2) I had no idea it had a chapel.
So I decided to go online and research this…
Weddings | Comment (0)through good times and bad…
Posted by Sara.
Who would think that 3 weeks into it we’d already be dealing with getting through the “bad times” together?
Weddings | Comments (4)