A lot of women wear their mother’s or grandmother’s gowns. My mom’s wouldn’t fit me (it zips up just fine until the upper back-she has a much smaller bust than I), and I’d like my great-aunt to make me my dress, if I ever get married. She’s the most fabulous seamstress I know.
Actually, the white wedding dress worn once tradition was started not by us 'merkins, but by England’s own Queen Victoria. HA!
I want to get married on a beach, barefoot, no real ‘wedding dress,’ guys in suits, top couple buttons undone, no ties, etc. Just nulclear family and best friends. Then come home and party down with everyone. I’m not into the church weddings, formal stuff.
I’ve been to one sort of weird wedding - my ex’s friend. Really small, no reception, and some really crappy music played throughout the wedding, with lyrics, and you couldn’t hear what the preacher was saying. It was uber boring.
If I ever get married, it’s gonna be in a field on a nice summer day. 
Oh ick. I’ve been to four weddings where someone at the head table spoke only Italian, and not one of them did this. I’d never even heard of it until about ten years ago.
Hey we had one of those! Pizza and a cooler of cokes then headed to the creek.
We didn’t have a big dinner recepition thing, we all wanted to go BACK to the creek.
I hated the unity candle tradtion thing. I blew mine out on accident. :smack:
I’ve been to one rehearsal dinner, and it was lovely. It was at my friend’s wedding in Cleveland. As I lived in California at the time, we very rarely saw each other, so it was nice to be able to spend a little more time with her. (Although of course she was busy with other guests as well and stressed from the wedding planning.)
On the WAY other end of the spectrum:
My roommate-at-the-time and her fiance got married in 2004 and didn’t tell anyone. Including their parents, or me. And I was living with them! They had always said they would have an incredibly low-key wedding and no one would no about it, but somehow I’d assumed that they’d tell ME. (I should note that we were actually friends, not just roommates, and her fiance and I had already been good friends for years when we met her. I sort of inadvertently introduced them.) Nope, I should have just believed them. They just disappeared one weekend, and when they came home on Sunday night, they didn’t mention anything about it. They thought it would be funny to see how long it took me to notice Paul’s ring. I did notice on Monday evening, but only because Paul was rapping it against a doorframe. When they started laughing and admitted they’d been married at city hall on Friday, I believe my exact words were “are you fucking kidding me?” They had to pull out the marriage certificate to prove it to me.
There are no wedding pictures. The wedding dress is a pretty, but perfectly ordinary blue sundress. Their families each held them a party afterwards, but it was no big thing.
The more I think about it, the more I think they did it the right way. The very idea of shopping for a wedding dress makes me break out into hives. (I wonder if I could get my mom’s dress altered to fit me. That would be a laugh. That I’m five inches taller than my mom is the least of the trouble: my parents were married in Berkeley in 1973. My mom wore a Mayan peasant dress embroidered with flowers. I don’t think so.)
I’m in Toronto too, and the rehearsal dinner has been part of wedding culture in my family and group of friends my whole life. Like Bibliocat said, it’s just the dinner that follows the rehearsal, and maybe in some cases does tend to get out of control.
Me, I had a bbq in my in-laws’ backyard, and it was really a lot of fun - it doesn’t have to be all fancy like the wedding dinner tends to be.
The thing about weddings is that they are supposed to be fancy versions of your own best social life, not a grandiose pageant of no stylistic relevancy to the rest of your life. None of the rules are set in stone (aside from “do not make snarky comments about the bride’s wearing white” and “send out thank-you notes promptly”) and the embellishments thereto are universally the fault of excessively creative couples and the bridal industry, not “etiquette,” which nevertheless is invariably blamed for them.
Of course, it is possible to do things a bit too informally. My brother once received a phone call from a friend, saying that a mutual friend was getting married. “Great!” said my brother. “When?”
“Tonight! Come to the corner of Papineau and Ontario at 6 PM.”
I’m sorry, but getting invited to a wedding and told to go to a particular street corner is bad enough – but especially that street corner. Oy. In the end, they didn’t go through with it.
Well, I wouldn’t call this a tradition …
When I got married the first time it was a big, traditional, Catholic church wedding. The second time it was a more casual family wedding at home.
This time I had taken a day off work for my annual gynocological check up and my fiance suggested that would be a convenient day to head over to the court house and have the clerk of the court marry us.
So, I got checked out by the doc at 9:00 and married at about 10:30.
Friends later asked Mr. Jones if that was anything like taking a used car to your mechanic to have it checked out before buying it.