A Spring Wedding: At home

Back where we lived in Los Angeles, we held a backyard reception for our dear LA people.  A friend did the flowers.  A friend made the delicious cake.  Another made the most amazing handmade chocolates for our joking under-the-sea theme complete with starfish and a treasure chest–a work of art and delicious!  We got sushi from our favorite sushi place and vegetarian Indian from the great place around the corner.  As always, there was too much food.  The backyard was beautiful, my mother’s tenant had hung white lights in the trees.  We said our own vows.  I wore a blue dress I had worn to my brother’s wedding.  It was a lovely event, but somehow between the fall and the spring I had lost faith in our relationship.

Photo via Apartment Therapy

We had a celebratory wedding dinner with my extended family in Virginia in my stepfather’s family’s lake house.  This meant so much to me to celebrate with them, and we did it close to a holiday so everyone would be in town.  This was the most traditionally weddingy of the weddings: I got to rent chairs and tablecloths, work with a caterer, and order a cake!  My stepfather had plenty of folding tables, and for table decorations we had candles next to bowls of clementines, which I associate with happiness and one Christmas in Paris.  It was very, very budget and very homey and elegant, all at once. 

One thing that I really enjoyed was the favors.  I ordered these chocolate mice wedding favors because we spent summer at our log cabin near there and the cabin had many mice.  We use to sing this song as children: “Love them little mousies, them mousies I love to eat/Bite their little heads off, nibble their tiny feet.” So I got these delicious chocolate mice with adorable silk tails so we could do just that.  Except they didn’t arrive in time for the dinner (blizzard).  One of my clearest memories from this wedding is sitting around with my family the day after eating lots of chocolate mice.

A Fall Wedding:  It’s legal (and vintage and urban and modern…)

One my favorite books is called Happy All the Time, by Laurie Colwin.  When I started dating my ex, I found out that it was one of his favorite books, too.  We read it out loud to each other the first year we dated.  In it, the main couple goes to city hall in NYC to get married and then afterwards to Chinatown for a meal.  As an homage to this book, but also because my dear ex was rather traditional wedding-opposed, this seemed like an appropriate and low-key way to get married.  We did this in NY also because it is where his family and friends are based, as well as some of my dearest and oldest as well.  I wore a $20 white silk dress that I found in a local LA boutique (marked down because of a broken zipper) and a vintage fake fur coat with a beautiful lining I picked up at a yard sale.  We got married at city hall and then walked to Chinatown afterwards and had a wedding banquet.  I was enamored of those classic French photographs where the wedding party walks through the street after the ceremony; I had that photograph.  After the dinner, we had a huge party in my ex’s parents’ loft.  It was chic, it was personal, there was toasts; I believe there was also dancing.

Reading all the lovely wedding blogs and magazines, here is what I have realized: I have already had the indie wedding, the budget wedding, the city hall wedding, the vintage inspired wedding, the backyard wedding, the small family wedding, and the urban loft wedding.  And, to be clear, I have only been married once, not seven times.  Here’s what happened: my ex and I had the brilliant idea to have 3 geographically distinct wedding parties.  Instead of everyone having to come to us, we would come to them.  On one hand, it was great to have so many different types of events.  Each was a reflection of some aspect of us, and they were quite lovely. 

On the other hand, to come back to my fundamental question: since I have already experienced quite a few sorts of weddings, how will my future (still quite) imaginary wedding be different?