Personalization

Meaningful Rituals: Your Wedding Ceremony, Part 3

 in Ceremony / Guests / Personalization / Rituals / Unity Rituals / Weddings  tagged personalized rituals / personalized wedding / unity ritual / wedding / wedding ceremony / wedding guests / wedding rituals / weddings by

Meaningful rituals can raise your wedding ceremony from interesting to truly memorable. Over the last two weeks we’ve talked about ways to make your ceremony uniquely yours by starting with the basics and using thoughtful choices of music and readings to reflect your personalities and interests. Choosing to include meaningful rituals is yet another way to make your ceremony your own.

Ring Warming, courtesy of Midwest Life Shots

Starting early in your ceremony, a ring warming ritual can bring your guests into the ceremony in a real way. Sending your rings among your guests to be imbued with their love and best wishes for you, this ritual happens in parallel as your ceremony continues. Or later in the ceremony, having your guests imbue pebbles with their wishes can create a memento of your ceremony.

Unity rituals that celebrate your exchange of vows are common these days, but the ritual itself doesn’t have to be. Love letters, tree plantings, handfastings, and flower blendings are all newer, interesting rituals with lovely symbolism. If your a traditionalist a candle lighting or sand blending can be made special and personal with add-ons and personal wording, too.

Love Letters

The absolute most meaningful rituals are those created expressly for you. Working with your celebrant you can celebrate your heritage, honor a special moment from your courtship, or share a part of your life through a custom written unity ritual. Examples I’ve written for couples include ice cream sharing, Turkish tea brewing, cairn creation, and whiskey sharing. In each case we were able to share something significant about the couple as part of the ritual, letting the guests know them a little better and creating a memorable moment.

Investing yourselves to collaborate with your celebrant you can define the outline of your ceremony, including those elements that are meaningful to you. You can share your personalities through selecting music and readings that you love or that represent your feelings toward each other. And you can select or create meaningful rituals to draw your guests into your ceremony and celebrate your love and commitment as a couple in a memorable way.

As 2020 couples begin to engage with celebrants to craft ceremonies you are limited only by the creativity of you and your celebrant. Have fun as you make your ceremonies uniquely your own.

Leveraging The Season

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Leveraging the season is a great way to make your wedding ceremony feel timely and current. Decor, flowers, even the colors you choose can focus your day on the time of year you are marrying. If you have a favorite season and have chosen that for your wedding, even better!

A recent harvest themed wedding I officiated included pumpkins and mums. The bride is a very outdoors person, and table decorations included cross sections of a tree with deer antlers, flowers and candles. Pumpkins marked the entrance to the venue (in this case, decorated with the logos of the sports teams they follow). Huge burgundy mums on pedestals marked the ceremony space, and the bridesmaids wore burgundy dresses. The bouquets were mixed fall flowers from the bride’s garden. All these touches effectively leveraged the current season and the interests of the couple.

A winter wedding from a few years ago relied on ice blue and silver to accent the overall white theme of the day. Flowers, dresses, table decor, even the cake followed the winter wonderland theme fitting in perfectly with the frigid January day. A winter solstice themed wedding celebrated the return of the sun with its light and warmth.

Spring offers all kinds of themes from growth and rejuvenation to the Spring Equinox and fresh light colors. Seed packets can be gifted to guests to plant and a tree can be planted as your unity ritual. Perhaps a refreshing Spring themed cocktail can serve as the signature drink.

Summer weddings offer the opportunity to celebrate the long, warm days being experienced. There is a reading that begins, “Now in midsummer, a wedding…” which may be a perfect selection. Fans for your guests to stay cool during the ceremony make great favors, and decor in the rich, vibrant colors of summer fits right in. Offering cold water or lemonade before your ceremony can set the right tone.

If you met during the season you are marrying, got engaged during this time of year, or have birthdays around the wedding date those ideas can all be integrated into your ceremony and your day. Finding ways to connect the season to your relationship allows you to make the ceremony and your wedding day even more personal.

Whatever month you choose to marry, leveraging the season helps with your budget as you utilize nature and decor – think flowers in season – and allows you to customize and personalize your wedding day in myriad ways.

Personalizing Your Unity Ritual

 in Ceremony / Personalization / Rituals / Unity Rituals / Weddings  tagged personal ceremony / personalized rituals / personalized wedding / unity ritual / wedding ceremony by

Personalizing your unity ritual is a wonderful way to share part of yourselves with your guests during your wedding ceremony. Unity rituals usually follow your exchange of vows and rings and are meant to be symbolize your coming together in marriage. There are a number of meaningful unity rituals that you can choose from, but creating a new ritual that reflects you, your interests or values can add extra significance to your ceremony.

Through the years I’ve had the opportunity to write unity rituals for couples that connected to them in various ways. Here are some examples:

Personalizing Your Unity Ritual – Hot Toddy

Hot toddies: This couple was serving hot toddies as the signature drink at their fall wedding, so we had them build one during the ceremony. We spoke about the sugar representing the sweet and loving moments in their marriage, and the lemon representing the more challenging times they may face together. The alcohol represented the strength of their love and passion for each other, and the hot water reflected the need to provide support and warmth each and every day. The ritual connected their guests to the couple and to the festivities to come. As toasts were raised with the signature drink during the reception, it hearkened back to the ceremony itself.

Personalizing Your Unity Ritual – Craft Beer Sharing

Beer sharing: With many couples enjoying craft beers these days, this unity ritual may have broad appeal, but it was especially meaningful for this couple – he ran a craft brewery and had invented the beer, she had named this particular brew “Sunny Days”, and they shared it and toasted their marriage with it during their ceremony.

Personalizing Your Unity Ritual – Cookies and Milk

Cookies and milk: This unity ritual shared an intimate part of the couple’s lives with their guests. Each day they shared milk and cookies at the kitchen table as they shared the events of the day with each other. They each had their favorite cookie. One needed non-dairy milk. They will carry these preferences and needs into their marriage, retaining their individuality. But by connecting each day they will ensure that their marriage and life together remains their focus.

Personalizing your unity ritual as these couples did allows your guests to know more about you as individuals and a couple, and connects the ritual to you in a memorable way. Whenever they share a hot toddy, toast with a beer or share milk and cookies it reminds them in a subtle way of their wedding day, of the promises they made to each other, and of the life they are building together. Let your unity ritual be just as powerful for you.

Vow Renewal Celebrations – To Show Your Love

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Vow Renewal celebrations are an opportunity to show your love once more. There are many reasons that you might consider a vow renewal ceremony as articulated in this article from Weddingbee. Just like your first wedding, a vow renewal ceremony can be whatever you want it to be.

If you didn’t have the ceremony of your dreams when you first married, this might be the opportunity to gather family and friends and do it up big. Perhaps military service, medical issues, finances or other constraints led to a simple certificate signing without any ceremony at all. Or you chose to elope and didn’t have the opportunity to celebrate with those people important to you. Now that your circumstances have changed, why not create the special moments and memories you missed the first time around? A ceremony complete with readings, rituals, music and a special walk down the aisle may be perfect for you.

A smaller, intimate ceremony may be called for if you are coming through a challenging time as a couple, or if you are focusing on remembering what you love about each other. Perhaps you will include a few special family members, but this kind of ceremony might be for just the two of you and your celebrant as you acknowledge the difficulties of the past and commit to moving forward as a couple, centered on your love for each other.

And finally, milestone anniversaries of successful marriages are definitely worth celebrating with vow renewal celebrations. This is an opportunity to bring in touches from your first wedding – perhaps say the same vows, use the same reading, or invite some of your wedding party to join you again. But this is also an opportunity to reflect on your successful marriage by including your children, by reminiscing on some of the highlights (and challenges you’ve faced together and overcome), and by making new vows to each other that honor the past and look to the future, too.

No matter the reason for your vow renewal celebrations, the ceremony will once again be the highlight of the day, and can be whatever you want it to be. You are limited only by your preferences and choices as you celebrate again the love you share, so make it special, personal, and authentically yours.

Leaving Tradition Behind

 in Ceremony / Personalization / Trends / Weddings  tagged wedding ceremony / wedding traditions / wedding trends / weddings by

Leaving tradition behind on your wedding day can allow you to personalize your event and also reduce the stress of the day. In recent weeks I’ve written about leaving tradition behind with regard to your wedding party and ceremony helpers. Today let’s consider other wedding ceremony traditions that are falling out of favor with couples.

Runners – These have been used for ages, first to keep “devils” from coming up through the stone floors in churches, and to help keep wedding dresses clean. However, runners at outdoor ceremonies are asking for trouble as the picture below shows. If you want to highlight your aisle, consider using flower petals as illustrated in the second picture.

Runner on a windy day

Veils, especially veils over the bride’s face – While veils are a wonderful finishing touch for a bride, they can cause problems at outdoor ceremonies when they catch on twigs or blow in the wind. Since the bride’s identity is no longer a secret, veils are a fashion statement these days and not a necessity. Fascinators, decorative combs, clips or pins are often used by modern brides and carry over gracefully to the reception, too.

Giving away the bride – This is another antiquated concept that was part of wedding ceremonies when the bride was chattel being legally transferred from father to groom. It’s perfectly OK to pass on this part of the ceremony. No one will miss it, and it feels pretty inappropriate for many couples who have established their own lives and professions in advance of marriage.

Using “man and wife” when pronouncing the couple married. Currently options include “husband and wife”, “husbands together” or “wives together”. This keeps the couple on equal footing grammatically and offers options for same sex couples.

Similarly, the traditional introduction of “Mr and Mrs John Smith” is often replaced with “Mr and Mrs John and Mary Smith”, “… as a married couple, John Smith and Mary Jones”, or simply, “… as a married couple, John and Mary.” These options identify you as equal partners in the marriage and work well for same sex couples and couples where neither partner is changing their name.

If you find value or enjoyment in wedding traditions, it’s fine to incorporate them into your ceremony, but leaving tradition behind when planning your wedding is equally fine. Choose rituals, language, decor and attire that represents you as a couple, and it will feel comfortable and authentic.