Well, here’s one way of looking at it - the wedding ceremony itself is fairly intimate, whereas the reception can be viewed as celebrating with the couple. If I didn’t know the couple well enough to attend an intimate event with them, but I did want to celebrate their happiness with them, I might attend the reception only. In situations like that, I would always be willing to pay my own way, but our conventions don’t really allow that.
And sometimes people are invited to the reception only.
My post was in response to Eva Luna, by the way, you sneaky Indygrrl. 
In addition to what featherlou said, some people feel hypocritical participating in a religious ceremony that’s contrary to their faith, even if only as “spectators.”
My cousin’s wedding was this huge affair – the bride and her family planned the whole thing and he basically tagged along. Big church wedding, reception in the Museum of Civilization atrium, etc, etc. “The last guests are just now filing out,” he says.
His second wedding… note the “second”… was this weekend. It was tiny – the only guests were their parents. This young woman has her head much more firmly on her shoulders. I’m sending them an acrylic.
Little Bird-that sucks.
I’m planning our wedding in September and I can sympathise.
But I’m actually enjoying most of it, except writing the invitations, which is taking me forever. Microsoft Publisher it NOT user-friendly.
Just relax and try not to stress too much. Our best men (yes, we’re having 2, one is signing the register and looking after the rings, one is doing the speech) are both in Canada and will be arriving home 3 days before the wedding. Thank God we got theie measurements at Christmas. It involved meeting one of them in a pub and buying him drinks first, and having the other one email his measurements, but we managed it.
Oh yes, and my MOH, my younger sister, is currently backpacking around the world and will be back from Brazil 2 weeks before the wedding. Her dress is being made (by the wonderful woman who is making the dresses for me, my mother and other sister), because we expect her to lose weight, so it can be run up quickly during that time.
We’re having 100 to the ceremony and dinner and 50 to the “afters”. It’s traditional here to invite as many people as possible to the party, and no-one takes it badly. After all, they’re not expected to bring a gift if they don’t come to the ceremony, so you’re just asking them to come and celebrate with you and dance the night away, while eating free nibbles and drinking heavily.
Just try to stay calm, doing whatever that means to you. In my case it means staying in a state of denial about any problems and repeating “it’ll all be FINE” ad nauseum. Whatever gets you through!
Only because you asked.
My (now wife) and I got married in Vegas … and we’re from Australia.
We woke up in the morning and decided to get married.
No ‘why didn’t I get invited’. No-one did.
Everything was cheap. I think we spent around $200 and most of that was on clothes.
We got a roll of film to take home. 12 pictures in all.
We got a limo ride to the wedding certificate office place, stood in line (all dressed up), presented our passports and were out in like 15 minutes.
I think one of our witnesses was a drunk who was sleeping his hangover off in the back of the chapel.
We had a wedding dinner at one of the casinos.
We’ve got the best wedding stories of any of our friends and we wouldn’t have done it any other way.
My next to youngest niece got married on April 9th. (Just to clear up any confusion, it wasn’t Gravity’s sister. ) The wedding, reception, and dinner/dance was all at the hotel all us out of towners stayed in. It was great! The hotel has a very nice atrium area where the wedding and reception (very thoughtfu thing to do and a fun thing for the guests while pictures were being taken after the wedding) were held. Because it was a weekend, the hotel was not super busy so they went out of their way to make sure everything went off without a hitch. The dinner/dance was a blast. Fun DJ, open bar, lots of dancing. Heck, I even got my mother out on the dance floor. Of course it was worth the trip for me from south GA to Chicago because it was my niece’s wedding, after all, but they really made it a fun time and a great party.
Guess I’m saying it can be big and fun at the same time. Best of luck to all of you planning weddings! Make it fun.
A tale of two weddings:
My roommate-at-the-time got married last year without telling anyone. I’m not kidding. She and her now-husband got married on a Friday and didn’t tell me til Monday. (And not until I noticed the ring on his hand…they thought it would be funny to see how long it took me to notice.) They told me not to feel bad because they didn’t even tell their parents for 24 hours. They celebrated their wedding by going to see a ballgame at Wrigley (their two teams were playing each other). Coincidentally, one of my coworkers, who’s a bit of a photography buff, happened to be at that game and took some pictures. When I told him the story, he had duplicates made for her. Those are their wedding pictures.
My cousin got married last year in the wedding to end all weddings. It was in Mexico City and people flew in from Hong Kong, London, all over the US, even Baghdad (the groom’s sister is a reporter for the BBC). There were hundreds of people, and we danced and danced and danced til 4 am. It was fabulous.
At the end of the day, both weddings are equally valid. The weddings went off just the way the participants wanted, and that’s what’s important. Don’t let anyone give you shit because your wedding was too fancy and expensive or because you went to the courthouse or to Vegas. (BTW, my friends psycat90 and Demo were married in Vegas and it was beautiful.)
:dubious:
Herein is the best advice anyone gave us about planning our wedding (two years ago next week):
Decide on three things you want people to remember about your wedding. Plan these three things with great care. As for the rest of it, do the bare minimum necessary to pass muster: if anyone tries to get you to do more than the bare minimum in these areas, say, and the exact words are important here, “Fuck that shit!”
For our wedding, we focused on these three things:
The things to which we said, “Fuck that shit!” included:
-Flowers (someone went out to the farmer’s market the day before the ceremony and picked up some pretty arrangements)
-Photographer (we called the guy who did the photography for my sister’s wedding and hired him without interviewing anyone else).
-Napkins (who cares if they match the dresses?)
-Coordinated clothes for the wedding party (just don’t show up in cutoffs, please)
-Little useless wedding favors (“fuck that shit!”)
-Acceding to all the wishes of our parents.
It was a wonderful, wonderful day, and we still have lots of people tell us it’s the nicest wedding they’ve ever been to. Remembering only to worry about the three things we cared about meant that our worries were much, much fewer, and we could do a good job with them.
Perhaps it’s time to have a Come to Jesus with the parents, and tell them that they need to back off, for the sake of your sanity? Does your husband care about whether his best man is wearing a tux? If not, this might be a great occasion to practice your, “Fuck that shit!”
Daniel
(On preview I see this is a tad incoherent, but whatever, I’m too busy to fix it.)
My wedding was perfect. I’d usually shy away from a post like this, but my wife did something last night that hurt me(won’t go into it here…but it was very minor) so I’m mad at her for doing it, and mad at myself for caring…So I need to remember why I’m so lucky to have married her.
The ceremony was wonderful. Beautiful. (you can read it here: Blogger) and was delivered by my college buddy, who is a ULC minister, but not at ALL religious. In fact actively hostile to anything spiritual at all.
I walked down the aisle with my parents, something “Weddings for Dummies” said was a Jewish tradition. It appealed to us very much, so we decided we’d do it too. I walked down to The Canon in D, which is just a song I adore, and always imagined walking down the aisle to. My wife walked down with both her mother and her dad. She walked down the aisle to the theme song from “A princess bride.” and she was a beautiful princess of a bride. We had a mariachi band present to sing during the lasso, a hispanic wedding custom. I won’t even get into the whole ceremony, because I could ramble all day about it, but it was simply incredible and perfect.
The reception was wonderful. Beautiful. No headaches, nothing went wrong. Great food, and we all enjoyed ourselves. People we NEVER expected to dance danced all night long. A wonderful time was had by all.
Our parents were very hands off and let us design our day and our wedding as we see fit.
Yes it was all wonderful.
But when I think about what a great wedding day we had, I don’t think about those things as much as I think about what happened earlier in the day.
My wife and I actually stayed together the night before the wedding, in our own home, Just the two of us, and our daughter. We woke up unrushed and unhassled. Soon, everyone showed up, as our house became the place for all the women to get dressed and made up. I ran out, got bagels and such for everyone, then went to the tux shop to have a little last minute work done to my tux. I went back to the house, got most of my stuff ready, and took off for the Downtown Atlanta Ritz Carlton.
Everyone involved in the wedding showed up at the Ritz beforehand for a photoshoot. We’d had an issue with the contracted photographer. We couldn’t get out of the contract, so we picked a better photographer, and had a shoot done BEFORE the wedding.
This was SUCH a hard choice for us to make. The whole idea of “not seeing each other until she walked down the aisle” thing kept making us think we would make a mistake by seeing each other first…but we finally decided traditions be damned, this is what we want.
And once we got down there, we had a fabulous time. It was just the most fun photo-shoot, EVER. We LOVED this photographer (he shot our engagement pics) and it meant so much for us to have him there to shoot this special day with us.
You can view the pictures here: http://www.mindspring.com/~olwizard/wedding/
(the first few shots are when we first saw each other all dressed up…getting all teary eyed)
After the shoot, everyone took off in different directions, and I realized…my wife and I were alone at the hotel, with nobody to drive us. So, we got in my car, and we rode together, in full tux and wedding gown, to the chappel. On the way we went through the Wendy’s Drive-thru to get a little snack before the big show.
THAT is the essence of my wedding day. My wife and I, alone, together, bucking traditions, and going to Wendy’s. That hour we spent together, as if there was nobody else in the world, was the most wonderful part of the day for me. It reminded me that this girl was the best friend I’d ever had, and that we could always have fun, just being together, riding in a japanese car through a wendy’s drive-thru, in full wedding regalia.
We spent almost every moment until it was time to walk down the aisle, together. There were some things that went wrong, and we’d get stressed about it. (People, get contracts with the mariachis, or they’ll show up with a bigger band demanding more money). But overall, that time we spent BEFORE it was time to go, was the most beautiful time ever.
I’ll never ever forget that day, and how wonderful it was to spend it with my very best friend.
Steve(not as upset anymore 
)
That’s a great story, Steve (and great pictures, too!), and you make a great point - we didn’t do the “don’t see each other” tradition either, and some things went wrong before our wedding, too (like having a big ol’ yellow umbrella iced on top of our wedding cake), and having my fiancé by my side to deal with them made everything easier. Besides, he’s my best friend - I wouldn’t want to spend most of this important day without seeing my best friend.
Yeah yeah yeah… 
Really, I have in no way freaked out about the tux thing to Bird Man. I have not demanded anything from him or “Best Man.” I am not throwing tantrums. I am simply hoping and waiting for Bird Man to realize that this person he thinks is his best friend is really a little weasel who is too chickenshit to tell him he doesn’t want to be in his wedding and is just fucking up on purpose in order to make Bird Man have to throw him out.
I think tonight Bird Man and I will have a little talk about “Best Man.” I know Bird Man will not want to call him and tell him he’s out, so I may have to. And I will not be pulling punches. But if Bird Man still insists that “Best Man” retain his post, I will let Bird Man have his way. But then I will have to see his face when “Best Man” dissapoints him again, probably on our wedding day, and that will really suck.
Oy, I feel your pain.
My hubby’s best man and my MOH used to date in college-but broke up about 3 years before our wedding (all of this happened a long time ago). When my MOH found out that J was to be BM and had to escort her down a church aisle…she actually had the nerve to ask me how long was the aisle .
Friends like this are not needed at a wedding. Strangely enough, we are no longer friends with either the BM or the MOH…
then there was my (older) sister, who refused to smile in ANY of the wedding pics–she thinks that smiling makes her look like she has a double chin. At 115 pounds on a 5’4" frame, I don’t see it meself.
then there was the church, who lost our unity candle. I hadn’t really wanted one anyway, but now it was part of the ceremony. The church called me, as I having my pics taken all rigged out etc to inform me that there was no candle. I still wonder what they expected me to DO about it at that point. The church found a white pillar candle and we used that. Who cares? It’s a symbolic act, not sacred prize.
But compared to some stories, my are petty small potatoes. I kinda wish we had done something else, but I really don’t focus on it too much. Weddings can seem to loom so large and yet, after about 5 years–who looks at those pics? The marriage is much more important than the day/ceremony/party.
good luck, Bird people --and I hope the BM either shapes up or ships out.
I will link to this post that I made in another wedding thread for my pre-wedding jitters story.
The wedding itself went fine, other than:
I’m not good at smiling for pictures. There’s a great picture that I treasure of me and my dad in the bride’s room before the wedding, both of us grimacing and trying to smile. I love it because it shows where I got my inability to smile for pictures, not because it’s a good picture of me or him. I don’t look like I’m really smiling in too many of my wedding pictures.
The photographer (we had our pictures taken before the ceremony too, btw) made me take off my glasses for some of the pictures. I can see clearly for a distance of about 1 foot without my glasses. In most of the pictures without my glasses, I look stoned- it’s clear I’m not focusing on the photographer.
During the ceremony, I left my bouquet on the bima (altar) with the MOH. I still don’t know how it got back to me- I looked at the pictures of the recessional, and nobody’s carrying two bouquets, and nobody who wasn’t supposed to have one has one. But it got back to me somehow. There is a picture of me recessing down the aisle, holding Mr Neville’s hand, with my other hand in a clenched fist. I don’t do so well at being the center of attention.
I almost lost my engagement ring during the reception. I have oddly shaped fingers- they have an indentation toward the base, and are bigger as you get up towards the knuckle. The upshot of this is, my engagement ring fit fine without the wedding ring, but was too small with the wedding ring under it. So I moved my engagement ring to my pinkie finger after I put the wedding ring on. After I got out of my bridal gown at the end of the reception, I noticed that my engagement ring was gone. I did the closest I could to running (I was wearing heels, which I almost never do normally, and my feet hurt) back to the bride’s room. The MOH, one of the bridesmaids, and I pulled my dress out of the dress bag (after they had helped me wrestle it into the dress bag earlier) and shook everything out, desperately searching for my engagement ring. Fortunately, the MOH found it in the dress bag.