Postby Rabbette » Tue Aug 23, 2011 10:31 am
Hi ya Minxy - first I want to say, best wishes! I know you are excited (along with a whole other bundle of emotions trying to get this all straight)
I know exactly how you feel about writing the ceremony. I am not much of a formal writer and being diagnosed with dyslexia sure doesn't help with keeping thoughts and ideas straight for writing. However, I felt funny just using a ceremony that I found already written on the web, I felt like I wasn't putting fourth effort to write a good ceremony for my sweetheart and I to share.
So - with that said here are my tips... Combine the ceremonies you like to make your own 1 of a kind. I used at least 3 or 4 different ones (mostly on the same theme of LOVE) since my sweetheart and I come from 2 different spiritual backgrounds, and we didn't really feel right trying to combine them or include them since we are not overly spiritual anyway. We felt our ceremony should be about love and our gift of love to each other. I also worked in a poem about clay *which was representational of our souls* (which was totally fitting b/c I do ceramics) and art in general is something we both love.
What my sweetheart and I ended up with was wonderful (he helped do some editing once I got the jist)
We got our rings tattooed on (we both have jobs that would interfere with us wearing jewelry) so that was our best option. (however, trying to find a tattoo artist in VA to tat your finger was difficult especially b/c we do not have ANY other tattoos! We modified the "rings" part of the ceremony. We tied each others finger with a ribbon covering the tattoo then at the end of our vowes we untied the ribbon while saying "With this symbol I now entwine my life with yours forever."
We also did a unity painting during the ceramon I abstractly painted one half of the canvas with green & he painted his half with blue, then we folded the canvas and pressed it, then opened it - like an inkblot (We had some words in the ceremony that went with this while we were doing it.)
We got married at a music festival and we planned the wedding in 3 weeks. Crazy huh. We knew each other 3 years and had been engaged for a year, but my sweetheart was a bit stressed out over the whole trying to plan a big wedding thing (and personally so was I) We also felt like spontaneously planning and having the wedding was better, so that our families wouldn't be too upset about us getting married so far away and that they would not be there.
We had about 12 friends and they all LOVED the wedding and some even commented on how it was exciting and not boring b/c it wasn't the same ol run of the mill kind of thing - and it only took about 5 or 6 minutes for all the "words" part of the celebration.
Cheers with all your planning!
Smile, who cares if you don't have all your teeth.