The Ceremony , Part II

I know it's a blurry one (my friend claims she was bawling when she took it), but I just love how The Candyman planted one on me!

As I mentioned before, The Candyman and I totally lifted several parts of our ceremony from fellow Bloggers as well as from traditional wedding ceremonies. I have no shame in admitting this because what we found from others was incorporated into how The Candyman and I chose to commit ourselves to one another. How you do that is completely up to you and your fiance.

We found a part of our ceremony through one of my favorite budget brides at 2000 Dollar Budget Wedding. She had created a list of favorite ceremonies. We stole part of our ceremony from Peonies and Polaroids.

Here's how it started:

Officiant:

The Candyman and Louise want to thank each of you for coming today to share in this very special time in their lives. Those of you who have been invited here to witness Louise and The Candyman's wedding ceremony and to celebrate with them today will play your part in their marriage too. There are only two official witnesses at a wedding but each and every person here today will witness the words that they will speak to one another and the vows that they will make. You should take good care to remember these words; for a marriage needs the help of a community, of friends and family who will be there when needed and will do all that they can during hard times to stand by Louise and The Candyman and offer their support to them and the new family that they will create. May you always do all within your power to support the union that will be made here today and to nurture the bond between these two people whom you love.

Throughout time countless millions of people from many cultures, religions and societies have gathered among friends and families to celebrate their love for one and other and their commitment to each other. Each culture has symbols and rituals to celebrate marriage from the Japanese tea ceremony to the Jewish tradition of breaking the glass, a rich tapestry of traditions from around the world combine to symbolize the meaning of marriage. And today we should try to remember that a wedding is a symbol, a beautiful, heartfelt and meaningful symbol but a symbol nonetheless. This ceremony is not magic, it will not create a relationship that does not already exist and has not already been celebrated in all the commitments The Candyman and Louise have made to each other, both large and small, in the days since they first met and recognized their connection to one another. It is a symbol of how far they have come together and a symbol of the promise that they will make to each other to continue to live their lives together and to love each other solely and above all others. And it is in the spirit of these symbols that The Candyman has prepared a poem titles The Great Concatenation and has asked his friend James Monroe to read for us.

The Great Concatenation

At dawn, the morning fog crowds

About church steeples as if pausing in meditation

Before beginning the day

And in that quiet stillness

I belong to you

The light of the setting sun

Glinting off grain silos makes me pine for you

I can't explain why

In your eyes, there lies

The pulsing flirtation of fireflies

Hovering about paper lanterns

Suspended effortlessly in the summer night

The space between us aches me,

As seas of mist converge above my head in cloudscapes

Like weightless gray elephants in some distant caravan across the sky

There lies a part of you to delight me in all the beauty that I behold,

From the eerie astral eye of the Hourglass Nebula

To the gooey center of a perfect grilled cheese sandwich

The thread of you is woven through the firmament

Even our very atoms were once the embers of ancient stars

But through some great concatenation

We have arrived here in this moment finally whole

To revel on the miracle that is us.

Yeah, my man wrote a poem for me on our wedding day. How bad ass is that? I'll write about our vows later in the week. Dallas is kinda sucking. They call it Dall-ASS, Tex-ASS for a reason, folks.

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The Ceremony, Part I

This is an auto-post. Just so you know. When you read this, I will educating others on the beauty and splendor that is my January 2010 release (home decor is like, so much later than RTW fashion). We can only hope that it's a smashing success.

In the meantime, there are things I have yet to share about the wedding. Big, beautiful, lovely things that you simply must know.

Our ceremony, if anything, was totally lifted from a host a resources. The Candyman, being the wordsmith in the house, had final say over the vows and I completely trusted him in this endeavor, even though I did fight with him on some things. With time, I saw he was right.

Th template we used came from our wonderful officiant, Minister Ralph Griggs. Minister Griggs is a wonderful, non-denominational minister. Since The Candyman and I don't belong to a church here but wanted to marry in a House of God, the combination of Minister Griggs with Owen Chapel was personally, the best for us. We could not have asked for more or better.

Minister Griggs has a wonderful (and easy) Ceremony Planner that covers the basics of any Christian ceremony. If he performs the ceremony, the guide is free. You can edit the guide at will to meet your religious and commitment needs (that sounds like a commercial, "to meet your commitment needs, call us!").

He also has at At-Home Marriage Preparation Course that comes free with his services. The Candyman and I found this course very interesting! If you take the course, you save $60 on your TN marriage license. Since The Candyman and I believe in counseling, we didn't have to complete the course, but we got through most of it anyway because it was so interesting. It asks really interesting questions that you don't normally think of. For instance, there was a question that asked us what we would each do if we won a million dollars. Like, for real. Don't be all, "Dude, I'd totally go to Vegas, and then Prada and then buy a phat crib." If you both say that, then um, you might have some issues later in life - I'm just sayin'. What was cool is that we both had the same answers - just allotted differently. My plan was to save most of it, pay off law school loans and help family members with the rest. The Candyman had pay off law school loans, help family members and then save the rest.

For some reason that small activity gave me a huge feeling of being bonded to The Candyman in a new way. It gave me such a comfort to know that while we may not have agreed on percentages, our priorities of what was important to us was similarly sound. The entire course was laid out in much the same way. Simple activities that gave you pause to think and compare. As I have mentioned before, I think counseling either by a priest, minister or counselor is always a good idea.

WEDDING TIP #9 - If you do decide to go to a counselor, therapist, shrink, guru, minister, priest or shaman - know this: if either of you are unhappy or uncomfortable with the individual chosen to assist you in your couple's training, you should choose another.

The Candyman and I had started counseling with an individual who was horrid. HORRID. I cannot and will not tell you the things this woman said to us. "Bu-bye" was what we said to her. Do not feel you have to stick with someone who makes you unhappy, simply because they are a professional in their field. Properly trained people in the field of therapy should make you feel positive after a session. They should encourage you to look inward, seek resolution, practice new behaviors and to be open and honest without being hurtful or unkind. Sometimes these practices are painful and difficult to work through. However, the person who is trained and who you pay to give you sound advice should prove trustworthy to you and your partner. I'm just sayin'....

Anyway, I can't gush enough about Minister Griggs. He performed our ceremony with feeling and with intent. Several people commented on the ceremony and how they liked how we incorporated certain elements. We are just so thankful that we were able to find a minister who was willing to give us the ceremony that The Candyman and I dreamed of having. We both had a little concern about that, living in what can sometimes feel like the buckle of the Bible Belt. The Candyman and I were raised with Christian backgrounds, but neither of us has ever found "home" in a particular church, so we don't go. The churches in Tennessee can often be a little conservatively aggressive to our more liberal thinking. Knowing that we could honor our God as well as ourselves and our beliefs was such a wonderful relief to us, a very natural and obvious choice.

Thank you, Minister Griggs for a wonderful service. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your role in our wedding celebration!

Coming soon - The Ceremony, Part II or How The Thirty-Something Bride and The Candyman Lifted Their Wedding Ceremony from Fellow Bloggers. It could go either way. Stay tuned!

P.S. I had some pictures planned to post with this, but Blogger is uploading black squares at this very moment. My apologies for lack of visual stimulus.

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The Bloomin' Truth - Flower Budget

I'm not big on flowers. I knew this wasn't going to be a huge chunk of my money. Don't get me wrong, I love flowers. But they are so expensive. And they die.

On top of it, I used to work for FTD. I was the Product Development manager for their floral containers. I know a lot more about the inner workings of flower shops, florists and floral wholesalers than the average bride, in my opinion. I certainly know what I don't like:

Leather Leaf (hello, 1985)
Plumosus (it sheds little tiny green needles - like a mofo!)
Bear Grass (hello, 1997)
Baby's Breath (unless you are doing an all Gypsophilia thing like these:)

From The Martha, of course.

Found this on The Sweetest Occasion. Never knew about this blog. It's AWESOME!

I found this on Weddingbee (God, how I hate that site), but don't know the original source. If ya know it, lemme know!

I am not a big rose kind of girl. I like some weird flowers, most of them happen to be cheap. Lucky me! Now, I don't know if this was the smartest thing for me to do, but I only interviewed one florist. Yup. Just one. And I have no recollection as to how I found her. I think I was just hunting on-line, found a link to her on some seriously obscure wedding web-site and then found examples of her work on Flickr. I made an appointment, talked to her about what I wanted and what I knew about flowers. I was up front about flowers not being the bulk of my budget and that I wanted to trim the fat at every possible turn. She was totally down with it. Her name is Angela Sadler.

I think we went through about 6 or 7 quotes until we got to where I wanted it. The thing is, I had a hard time deciding what I actually wanted to do with the flowers at the reception. You can read about that here. I finally decided, bit the bullet and went for staggered bud vases scattered on the tables, mixed with small votives (provided for FREE by Mere Bulles!). I got my bud vases on sale at Crate and Barrel, Target and Ikea and had a total of 5 different shapes and styles. I bought WAY too many. The good thing was that I was able to return ALL the vases to Target (I did get a merchandise credit because I had purchased them long ago), and I sold a good chunk of the C&B bud vases to Angela. I still have the Ikea ones and some of the C&B ones that I will offer to sell here as soon as I can get my act together.

I met with Angela a few weeks before the wedding at the local wholesale florist place to review and pick out flowers as well as to show Angela the bud vases. Apparently, most brides don't do this. Angela made a comment about how involved I was! I'm not sure if this was a good thing or what, but I like to see what I'm buying. Anyway, you can see what we did here.

We kept the ceremony flowers super-simple since I knew it was going to be a short service. Why pay tons of money for something people are going to see for 30 minutes, tops? Owen Chapel has it's own unique charm, so I didn't want to over-do it. We had wreaths on the doors, a large wreath inside and two large alter arrangements.

How did I save? A few ways:

1. I saved $25 on the large wreath by purchasing the wreath myself. It was about $13 with tax and coupon use at JoAnn's, so it saved a little over $10. Hey - every little bit counts!
2. I saved $5 each ($10) on the door wreaths. I bought those on sale at Micheal's for $3 for both.
3. Going the bud vase route versus centerpieces saved me about $500 from the original quote! Angela had really affordable arrangements using BIG flowers like hydrangeas, football mums, gerbers and stock. We used really beautiful variegate pittsporum and snow berries as the filler, both affordable.
4. We had one large corsage for my mom and then smaller corsages for the other females in the group (no MOG for us, so no need).
5. We used really big, really inexpensive flowers in my bouquet: gerbers and football mums. The most expensive flower was a garden rose that we added, just to make it a little different than the MOH's bouquet.
6. I had my go-to girl Alecia take one of the alter arrangements as well as the door wreaths to Mere Bulles to add to the ambiance there.
7. I chose teeny tiny little button mums with fern curls for the boutonnieres. The guys really liked them and they were CHEAP!

Here's the budget breakdown.

The delivery and set up was "free" - I just took out the bud vases Angela bought in trade. The total here doesn't count the $60 I made back from the returned Target vases. Hopefully, I'll get a little more back if I sell the remaining Ikea and C&B vases. I was really hoping to come in under $1500 on this and I might in the end. Who knows.

There was one thing that I didn't like about all of the flowers and that was the handle on my bouquet. Again, I blame no one but myself for not being more specific. I had wanted the stems of my bouquet wrapped in the left over lace from my mom's mantilla. I mean WRAPPED - like how they do it with the ribbon. I also had a pearl pin I wanted put on. Well, she used just the teeny-tiniest piece of lace, I think to preserve the lace usage, but that's not what I wanted. She could have used it all! At any rate, the lace shifted around as did the pin and looked a little tattered at the end. I assumed that the bouquet stems would be wrapped all the way down to their ends. That wasn't the case. I was afraid that the stems would touch my dress and leave a mark during photographs!


Wedding Tip #3: Be as specific as you can. Assume nothing. If you don't ever ask for it, you can't be sure of what you are going to get. If a vendor gets snippy because you're asking too many questions or giving lots of direction, let them or move on. You have a right to know exactly what you are paying for.

I really enjoyed working with my florist. She was happy to give me references, even one who had a wedding at Owen Chapel before! I contacted everyone and they sang Angela's praises and were straight up about her short-comings, the only one being that she wasn't one to reply immediately to emails. Knowing this bit of information saved me a lot of worry. Since I knew she would eventually reply, I could contact her in advance of needed info and wait out the response. She knew if I called, I needed her and she would call back in a jiffy. She was a great vendor to work with. I liked her personally and kinda wanted to get to know her more and just hang out. I think because I was around her age, she got me. That's how it all ended up though - we hired the vendors who understood The Candyman and I as people and treated us that way. That makes it all good.

The flowers were simple and beautiful. Mixed with the candlelight at Mere Bulles - they were STUNNING! The good thing about using the bud vases was that we were able to add them to different areas in the venue without a bunch of extra arrangement costs. We had some added to the fireplace mantel, the place card table and the cake table.

Gorgeous!