Our Wedding Day: Part 3
Welcome to the very last chapter of my blog series, our wedding day!
In my previous posts, I talked about the morning of our wedding day (including why we chose to do a first look) and the elements of our ceremony. You might have noticed a couple of themes pop up as I talked about our day - intentionality, slowing down, keeping it about us. Well, spoiler alert, those themes carried right through to our reception.
Following our ceremony, we moved straight into cocktail hour with our friends and family. While we had envisioned spending this time outside, playing lawn games and drinking margaritas in the warm sun, the pouring rain pushed everyone inside (*an important side-note: always plan for inclement weather! As much as we wanted to be outside, we also knew that we had to plan for the worst. Thankfully, we had chosen our amazing wedding venue (more to come on them in a future post!) because of their setup - two floors, so that if we had to move inside, we wouldn’t have to scramble to do any re-arranging).
These couple hours were some of my favourite. Here I was, in a room full of all the people I loved the most, offering their excitement and congratulations. Eric and I said from the beginning that we wanted this time to simply hang out with our friends and family, and while 2 hours still wasn't long enough, I'm really glad we made time for our guests.
As much as we could, we continued to throw in elements of ourselves into our reception - and I’ll be honest: some worked, some didn’t. Since one of our favourite games is Cards Against Humanity, we used that as a way to have the tables go up for dinner (it wasn’t as successful as we had hoped, but we had fun it with nonetheless. Also, let’s all just agree that there is no good way to make this part of the day enjoyable. Everybody wants to eat, and games don't exactly negate that fact).
But I’m proud to say what did work out was our food. I had photographed a wedding the year before that went against the norm of a traditional menu (and was ah-mazing) so I followed up with the caterers. And it just so happened that they were located in the closest town to our venue (serendipity?). When we went to Kim’s Katering and proposed our Mexican-themed menu, she was all in. We had a fajita bar with all - and I mean ALL - of the fixings, as well as one of our favourite dishes - tortilla soup.
The rest of the evening seemed to go by in a blur. We ate cupcakes that my bridesmaid Alicia made (all 140 of them!), we drank margaritas, we danced to a playlist of our favourite songs, and we re-lived our childhood through photographs.
All in all, there isn't much I would've changed about our wedding day. Yes, there were some things that didn't go exactly as planned, but we knew that was inevitable going in. There are so many parts to a wedding day that it's unrealistic to think that it will all go off perfectly. So by going in realizing some things would probably go differently than planned, we were able to take the unexpected with grace and acceptance. Which made the day all the more enjoyable.
To those who made it all the way to the end of this series, thanks so much for following along! I have loved getting to relive our wedding day and share some of what made our day so special.
If you’re a bride reading this and are overwhelmed by all the decisions you need to make for your day, I hope this has encouraged you to do things your own way. Not only will it make for a day that you enjoy, I’ll bet it brings you and your partner even closer, as you learn what matters most to you as a couple. Don’t be afraid to push the norms of a “traditional wedding day” - if you only want 15 of your closest friends and family to be there, do it. If you want to get married at night, outside, under the stars, do it. If you want to give your bouquet to someone who’s love has inspired you instead of doing a bouquet toss, do it. If you want to do the same traditional elements that your parents did in their ceremony, do it. Your wedding day is the start of your story as husband and wife - let it start on your terms.