Age-Group Wedding

There wasn't a post last Friday because I was gallivanting around London, being a super-tourist.

By the time you read this, I will be jet-setting my way to Edinburgh for my first Age-Group Wedding.


What do I mean by Age-Group Wedding?

I'm glad you asked! Allow me to explain...

What I mean by an Age-Group Wedding (this is probably not the technical term, but it's the one I'm using), is that it is a wedding between people who are the same age as me, would have been in my year at school. Naturally, this is a little trippy for me because yes, whilst I am engaged, I struggle to come to terms with the fact that I am actually now an adult and able to do things like get married. Having my peers do so means that what happened to me is not just an anomaly and we are all in fact getting older, and, by implication, should be more mature, responsible and generally normal (we're not).

Equally, I should be able to dress myself without accidentally making myself look like a human kingfisher (I can't); I should know better than to pick the spot the size of Mount Vesuvius on my forehead (I don't); and I really should be able to get the red wine stain out of the carpet instead of making it stain more and turn a funny colour (blue).

Where is the perfect skin I was promised? The sudden ability to do my hair properly in something other than pigtails? The neat handwriting that I was certain would appear immediately upon reaching adulthood?

Anyway, yes, this is my first Age-Group wedding, but fortunately this wedding will not bring quite the same level of weirdery that will come when my friends from high school start getting married, as the couple I met during my postgraduate study at University. I met them as functioning, put-together adults. (The wedding of my high school friend who used to bring his own hip flask of absinthe to restaurants will be another matter entirely, I'm sure)


Instead, what this will be is a chance to see a formal wedding done by people the same age as me, with enough time for me to tweak anything I've planning that will be stupid. Hopefully, this will allow me to see how things are done correctly, before I have a chance to make a monumental cock-up of it myself.


I know it sounds silly, but there are things I just don't know the logistics of, simply because having been to weddings previously, I was, as you'd naturally expect, considerably younger, and not at all interested in taking notes for "one day" because honestly, who does that when they're 19 anyway? I had other things to focus on. Mainly making sure that I intercepted any of the honey and garlic sausages that were on their way out of the kitchen before they could reach anyone else because good god they were yummy.

But now that I am in the midst of my own wedding planning (11 months on Monday, and also my birthday, I'll accept Amazon vouchers if you're feeling so inclined), there are things that boggle me. The church flower lady asked me what I wanted to do with the flowers. Apparently "make pretty look nice" isn't a helpful answer. So, church decorations, check. Additionally, seating plans vs escort cards - if you have a seating plan, why do you need escort cards? They seem to add an additional extra layer to convolute the previously simple task of finding your name on a list, and then finding the table that matched the list you were on. So, will we be escorted or just left to our own devices? Will they be doing menus? Will there be a guest book?

I know a lot of these questions seem banal, and could easily be googled but herein lies the issue: the majority of wedding advice sites out there are in the USA. This means that things which are normal for the USA are being promoted as THE ONLY WAY, even if they aren't common for the UK.


Par example - Open Bars vs Cash Bars.

If I have to see David Tutera's smug, orange little face one more time telling me that the worst crime you can commit is to ask your guests to pay for their own drinks I may put my foot through the computer monitor. In the USA, maybe open bars are the only conceivable option, but in the UK they really aren't. UK weddings last a lot longer than weddings in the US - the ceremony is usually around lunchtime, so having an open bar from 1:00pm to midnight would rapidly become extortionate, especially given the huge alcohol tax over here. What we DO do is provide welcome drinks when people arrive, and wine for the meal, and champagne for the toasts.

Bridesmaids first vs Bridesmaids second

In the USA, it seems to be that the bridesmaids precede the Bride down the aisle, accompanied by a groomsman. In the UK, all the men are already at the front, waiting patiently, and usually the bridesmaids follow behind the bride, so as to better check the train and veil etc. etc. They are less of the drumroll to the bride and more of the bridal support crew. Or the 'Sweeper Bus', like at a Marathon, picking up anyone that gets left behind midway down the aisle.

So yes, I'm excited to see a British wedding that will be working from roughly the same rulebook as me, and I know everything there will be immaculately put together, so I'm looking forward to the chance to see it done well and completed. They have fantastic taste, so it's going to be amazing.


These are just the bonus bits of course, I'm also CRAZY EXCITED to see my friends get married, and then party on down like a lunatic.

Word Association

What's in a name? that which we call a rose  
By any other name would smell as sweet;  
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,  
And for that name which is no part of thee  
Take all myself.

Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II

Excuse me showing off my literary knowledge there (alright, my literary copy-and-paste-from-wikisource skills but whatever), but I've been pondering names recently. Not, as you'd expect, based on what my own name might be after the wedding (hahaha don't even go there it's really hard okay), but more based on what other people name things. Like, say, wedding dresses.

I discovered in much of my online dress browsing that some of the things I think of when I see a word are apparently not the same things wedding dress designers think of when they see a word.

For example, when Pronovias think of the word Pergola, they think of this:

But when I think of the word Pergola, I think of this:

When Pronovias think of the word Bangor, they think of this:

When I think of the word Bangor, I think of this:

Sometimes browsing wedding dress websites feels a bit like I'm in a The Princess Bride:

So when I find dresses that are named after literary characters, you can imagine where my mind goes, given my previous thoughts on the matter. You see, apparently it's not just manufacturers of wedding decorations who don't think things through fully when it comes to literary references. Oh no.


Maggie Sottero is pretty bad for it too. Take, say, the Ophelia dress.

Man, that dress is so pretty. But wait, there's something oddly familiar about that name. I think it might be a bit famous?

OH THAT'S RIGHT. SHE DROWNED HERSELF.

The infamous Hamlet's girlfriend, he spent basically all their scenes together being awful to her, and killed her father, and thus ended up driving her mad and plummeting to a watery grave.



Or, the equally stunning Reagan dress:

Now, slight spelling difference aside, Regan was the name of one of the awful daughters in King Lear, if we are sticking with the Shakespearean theme, who faked affection for her father to get a bigger share of his land, drove him mad, and cast him out of her household, totally defenseless, whilst her husband and brother-in-law conspired to overthrow him and get the crown for themselves.

On a slightly more modern note, guess who else was called Regan?

Just the wedding-day look I'm after.

As well as my usual favourites, Juliet and Gatsby, there's also the Lillith dress.

So pretty! So froofy! So unfortunately named after the mother of all demons!

In Jewish folklore, Lilith was Adam's first wife, created at the same time as Adam, from the same earth. Unfortunately, this apparently made her somewhat... bolshy, and she refused to become subservient to him. This probably makes her one of the first feminist icons, however because it is like thousands of years ago and religion is involved, it makes her evil. According to one source, she flounces out of Eden and refuses to come back, instead chosing to do the horizontal tango with the archangel Samael, who no-one can quite decide whether he is good or evil; according to others she flies around at night kidnapping babies; and in yet another gives birth to 100 demons a day. I think I also vaguely remember one source having her growing demons from her waist, and everything below her waist was monstrous and deformed, but I'm having trouble finding the reference for that, but still, not a nice image.

Of course these are only a handful of the bizarre dress names out there, and I would like to add that these are beautiful dresses and the name associations are entirely my own. After all, I'm sure it doesn't mean anything at all if your dress is named after a girl whose boyfriend refused to marry her, killed her father and drove her to killing herself. That's not the sort of thing that could be an omen at all.

(no but seriously I'm just messing around here, please don't think I'm predicting doom and gloom based on the name of your wedding dress)

Fun with Fruit

And yes, I checked. Botanically speaking, Pumpkin is a fruit, because it's got seeds in.

Because we are having an Autumn wedding, I was really quite taken with the idea of using a mixture of autumnal foliage and pumpkins to decorate the reception. Not because I want a Halloween-y wedding, as one florist seemed to think, going on to suggest that she had jack-o-lantern and spider-shaped table confetti that might look nice (maybe, but not what I was after); rather, I like pumpkins, they make me smile, and they're also I think a nice, classy little nod to Jon's half-Canadian background.

Pinterest, that most dangerous of websites, provided ample examples of nifty pumpkin-decorations, thusly:

(if anyone can provide sources for these, that would be great - I've tried searching but the pinterest links lead to seemingly unrelated pages, and image searching it only brings up... more pinterest pages)

But not only was I enlightened to the idea of stuffing flowers in these seasonal gourds, but to the full range of decorative carving which could be done! Martha Stewart offered these twinkly, and exciting examples:

Although she wanted to cheat and stick fairy lights inside rather than a candle. Whut, Martha?

There were some beautiful decorative carvings as well, which were very elegant!

 

Now, in the UK, Pumpkin isn't really a big thing. It's literally only available for the two weeks before Halloween, and most people wouldn't even consider doing anything but carving it, so trying to find pumpkins that would be suitable for pumpkin pie this year was a bit of a trial. This meant that we had a two-week window to get hold of some pumpkins to have a go at this carving malarkey and see if we were capable of doing anything more than leering faces. HOWEVER, Jon accused me of attempting to ruin Halloween if I didn't do some that were at least marginally spooky, so instead it became more of a practice at using stencils.

Tadaaaa! Here they are, in all their mismatched glory. I'll let you guess which ones were by Jon, and which ones were by me, the 'Halloween Grinch'.

I got very excited about the prospect of projecting an image onto the wall behind the lanterns, and experimented with this to a greater or lesser effect (with mixed success).

Whilst Jon challenged himself to a more complex spin on the traditional theme.

However, Jon also told me, whilst we were beavering away with our carving, that he didn't want carved pumpkins around the place because they'd look rubbish in the day time. 

It's like he hasn't listened to anything I've been talking about for the past year, honestly. Back to the drawing board we go! Let's hope we're on the same page this time, and that he's paying attention.