As some of you may know, I’m getting married in September. To answer your questions, wedding planning is not really happening at all and no, I’m not nervous. The hubs and I are having a super simple, camping wedding. No catered dinner, painful speeches or horrible PowerPoint presentations where top-40 hits straight out of the 90’s usher you from one awkward childhood photo to the next.
What does a wedding look like to us? E-mail invites, 30-minute ceremony, $100 wedding dress and B.Y.O.B. Easy-peasy.
We both came to this realization after having been to several – what I like to call – ‘to the tits weddings’. You know what I mean, fully catered, paper invites and unnecessarily formal. The ones where it actually costs you money to go watch your co-worker get married and sit next to complete strangers. The ones where the bridal party sits on an elevated long table above everyone else like they’re the overlords and we’re all peons about to fight to the death.
The one striking consistency that I noticed during all of these weddings, was a complete lack of face time with the guests. Sure, the bride and groom and all the party members got to gab at their massive table where they sat through an entire dinner, speeches and someone’s drunken ramblings about that one time you guys went on a pub crawl in ’86 – but for the rest of the pawns in the proverbial wedding chess game, we each got 5 minutes of a totally hurried, “thank you for coming.” Y’know, when the bride runs around the dining room after dinner is finished, wrestling her massive, $2000 dress trying to say thank you to everyone in time before the couples and oldies split to go to the pub or better, bed.
I knew right away that the best part of every wedding is to have every single person you’ve ever loved or shared a part of your life with under one roof – a party to say, ”
Hey! I found this super awesome person! Meet them! Drink with them! Celebrate with us! Give us money!
” Just kidding on that last part. But seriously, no gifts.
That means no registry, no showing you what we’d like beforehand so that Uncle Larry doesn’t fuck it up and end up gifting us a pet chicken (although, I think we’d be stoked on a pet chicken).
And as a gesture to all my loved ones, I’m not going to make you sit through a dinner. I’m going to put out a bunch of food, graze if you will or if you won’t. But let’s just hang out. Right? So, we’re having a camping wedding and we’ve told all our loved ones to come for the ENTIRE weekend if they can so that we can have three totally awesome days to soak up all the goodness of each of their faces.
