Shower of bridal thoughts

Saturday, April 21, 2007 11:00 PM by lauranen

When I think about weddings, I always feel that I haven't been to enough of them to really know what they are all about. Well, obviously they're about celebration of love and witnessing the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Sounds pretty simple, but I have always thought that they follow a certain pre-set pattern. Most of the wedding-related websites I've visited appear to support my theory by waffling on and on about all the protocols and the customs. However, even though I've been to a good few wedding in the recent years, I can't seem to pinpoint too many common factors between the festivities.

One of my best friends got married in 2002, only days before I left Finland to live and work in Ireland for the first time. The wedding was very informal but yet beautiful and quite traditionally Finnish in many ways. There were many unusualities too: the bride was wearing a stunningly unusual dress, the couple were chauffeured from the church to the party venue with Igor (the Finnish adult movie/tattoo and piercing tycoon)'s long white limo, and the wedding band was one of the hottest Finnish rock bands at the time. An entire grilled pig made the dinner feel like one of the Gaulish village fiests pulled out of an Asterix story, with all the guests marinated in Getafix's cauldron of magic potion.

Against all odds, I was also invited to a wedding in Scotland in July 2004, after living there only for a few months. A friend from work had to find a "plus 1" for the wedding of his two childhood friends, and as he was too shy to ask anyone he fancied, I got to go to an authentic Highland wedding that took place in a little chapel in a mountain valley. It was all very traditional, men in kilts and the bag pipe blairing as the couple made their entrance. During the ceremony a friend of the couple, a tall African man sang a serene, breathtaking version of Amazing Grace. The newlyweds stood by a wall-sized window with the stunning backdrop of a pictoresque lake as his sweet voice flooded the room, it was definitely a moment to remember for everyone present.

In the spring of 2005 we went to a wedding in Ronan's family. For me it was a new and unique experience and I will always have warm memories of the night. It was the first wedding I attended in a Catholic church, and I was following the ceremony intently to spot the differences to the Lutheran ceremony - turns out there weren't that many. I met many of Ronan's relatives for the first time on the day, and also the evening party made compare the differences between the Irish and Finnish traditions. The wedding dinner was more formal than what I would've been used to back home, and to my surprise there weren't any games to embarrass the bridal couple - only a line of speeches, which seemed to serve a similar purpose (this I noticed also in the Scottish wedding).

Finally, last summer my sister got married in Helsinki, and Ronan and I had the honour of being the official witnesses in their straightforward but elegant civil ceremony. The other guests joined us at the reception a few hours later on an old (docked) steam boat in the Helsinki harbour. After the speeches we had a lovely buffet dinner and a few drinks. The olden (babysitting) generation eventually bid their goodbyes and us young adults moved downstairs to the nightclub, where DJs were on their positions and the punch was never too strong. At the end of the night my brother's friend took the remaining few guests for a nocturnal spin on his speedboat, which was a one of my best memories of last summer. The event was very definitely (but not exhaustively) quintessential to my sister. She had her nearest and dearest with her, there was nothing ostentatious about the day and the night floated past so smoothly and pleasantly, that I think we all felt the night was over too quickly.

Maybe I'm lucky to have been to such a mixed variety of weddings - at least I don't feel under pressure to have ours to follow a strict schedule and etiquette set by traditions. However, I am looking forward to the three weddings we've been invited to this summer. I'll have my notepad and pen handy and will shamelessly thieve all the best ideas, traditional or unique, for our big day.

Oh, and it's not just your real-life friends that inspire you for all things wedding-related - Twitter can be helpful too when looking for ideas! A while back Ellybabes twittered something using Moo cards to let people know about their wedding gift list, and after thinking about it ever since, I think we might be using Moo minicards for our Save the Dates. See, contrary to popular belief Twittering makes sense: other people's lives can inspire you in unexpected ways.