Thoughts.com Blogs - A Rather Unusual Wedding

I mentioned in an earlier post that when I was growing up, I was always thought of as "the Weird One" by my schoolmates, and that as I got older, I consciously made an effort to be a non-conformist. As an adult, it's somewhat harder to be a non-conformist - I suppose you could dye your hair blue, get a body tattoo, and live on a commune raising sheep and refusing to participate in the evil capitalist workforce, but I never saw myself as THAT much of a non-conformist. It was more that it just irritated me, and still does, to be doing the same thing as everyone else does; I like to find a way to stand out from the crowd in some way. I think one thing that I've done as an adult that represents that aspect of my personality pretty well is my wedding.

After my husband proposed to me last Christmas, we devoted quite a bit of discussion to figuring out what kind of wedding to have in the first place. We have both been to TONS of traditional wedding ceremonies and we have hated pretty much all of them. There have been a few exceptions - my friend Iesha, who ended up being my maid-of-honor, did hers well, and my brother had a great wedding, but it was not really a traditional wedding, which helped a lot, in my opinion. Anyway, we knew we wanted a "wedding" of some kind, because we both come from close extended families (and, in my case, LARGE extended family) and feel that special events should involve family, but we hated almost every aspect of the traditional ceremony. We considered going to Vegas and getting married by Elvis in a drive-through, but I figured my mom would kill me - I'm her only daughter, and since my brother had a non-traditional wedding (it was in the backyard of his in-laws' house, the bride wore a plain white sundress, we had barbeque and cheesecake - no wedding cake - and they made all of their own decorations and invitations, did their own flowers, and had friends tend bar, take pictures, and play CDs to dance to), my mom never got to plan a "real" wedding with flowers and a hall and a pretty white dress.

Once we made the decision that yes, we were going to actually have a wedding, I started the long and frustrating process of making it an interesting, original wedding that fit my personality. I'll spare you the details of the difficulties we had finding the right place to fit "us" and the MANY arguments with my mother, who didn't understand why we couldn't just do things the way they've always been done, and tell you what we ended up doing, as it illustrates my personality quite nicely.

First off, we didn't want to get married in a church - my husband and I were raised Catholic, but no longer practice religion. I also didn't want a typical, pretty-but-dull reception hall; I have seen weddings at some very nice halls, but they all look alike, in the end. I really wanted to be married outdoors, or in a place where we could see the outdoors, sometime in the fall when the leaves are pretty colors, and I wanted it to be someplace "different", someplace that wasn't a typical location for a wedding. We ended up finding Frog Pond Village, a gorgeous reception site in the Michigan woods, with an outdoor chapel where we had our ceremony. I've never seen anything like it before or since - we were very close to nature and everything looked fairy-tale-like and beautiful.

Since we aren't religious, my husband and I didn't want to be married by a priest or pastor, and we really didn't want to be married by a judge or justice of the peace - it seemed too impersonal. So we asked my husband's brother to become a minister online, which he did (just point and click - no religious belief necessary!) and then he was able to perform the ceremony. My brother is a classical guitarist, so we asked him to play his guitar for the music as we walked up and down the aisle, and we requested something non-traditional; he found some sort of pretty jazz piece to play, which I've never heard before, but it was very nice and was not your typical "Here Comes the Bride".

I didn't have a typical bridal party - only a maid-of-honor and a best man - and I let my maid-of-honor wear anything she wanted as long as it was a long dress in a fall color (she did a nice job, as you can see from the pictures). I refused to have typical white-and-gold or white-and-silver wedding invitations; my sister-in-law, who is an extremely talented artist, made all of the invitations by hand. They looked like big fall leaves, all in bright fall colors, and the envelopes had trees with falling leaves on them. Even though the reception hall provided free "typical" wedding decorations (white candles, white gauzy bows, pink flowers), we took them all down and replaced them with new decorations my sister-in-law made - fall leaves and pumpkins.

My dress was rather unusual - it wasn't white and certainly wasn't typical, although I bought it at the discount bridal warehouse on 880, right off the rack. It looked somewhat medieval, though, and I didn't wear a veil - I just had flowers put in my hair. I was surprised it was so easy for me to find a "strange" dress - I thought I was going to have to wear orange or something.

My husband and I HATE dancing at weddings (he just hates dancing, and I like going to clubs, but dancing at weddings is NOTHING like dancing at clubs - wearing a big, silly dress and dancing the chicken dance is NOT the same as freakin' to 50 Cent), so we refused to have either a band or a DJ, which eliminated most of the traditional wedding activities (Father-Daughter dance, Bride and Groom's first dance, etc). We also elected to skip Tossing the Bouquet and the Garter ceremony, which I find tedious and degrading. Instead, we brought playing cards, dominoes, and tons of board games, and set up tables for people to play games together after dinner, which ended up being REALLY cool - people got drunk and played Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary and Euchre and had a blast. We didn't have a wedding cake, so there was no "Feeding the Cake to each other" - we decided to have white and dark chocolate fountains instead - same price, MUCH better tasting, in my opinion. :)

One of my weirdest choices was the wedding hotel. My wedding was out-of-town for all of the wedding guests - the reception hall I chose was across the state from Detroit, where most of my family live, and of course I'm from California and my husband's family is from Australia - so everyone had to stay at a hotel. Instead of picking a nice Sheraton or Ramada, we picked the Great Wolf Lodge , which is a family hotel that looks like a huge log cabin and has an indoor waterpark, a mini golf course, an arcade, HUGE rooms built on a log-cabin theme, all with balconies, and an interactive treasure hunt game in all the hotel hallways that you play with a wand. It probably seems like the world's strangest choice for a wedding hotel, but it seemed to fit with our "outdoors" theme, and it fit US - we got to spend 4 days being kids again. We went to the waterpark, played mini-golf, and ate at the restaurants in the hotel, which were actually really good and served comfort food like chocolate chip pancakes and s'mores. And we had our rehearsal dinner at a place called The Blue Tractor Cook Shop , which was basically a bar and grille that served homemade Michigan food and is NOT the typical rehearsal dinner choice, but everyone had a blast. Again, it felt like "me" - weird, but lots of fun.

I've included some pictures from the wedding in my photo section so you can see what it looked like; in general, I think we did a good job of being "different". Sure, I still had a long dress and a ceremony and a reception, but there was enough about it that was "weird" to make it feel like me, and that pretty much sums up how I try to do everything, when I think about it.