Ah, weddings. A time for love. A time for celebration. A time to figure out exactly which wedding traditions to uphold and which ones you’d rather just scatter into the wind and leave to the brides and grooms of yesteryear.
Choke Design Company, having had a flurry of nuptial celebrations of our own in the last six months, knows a lot about traditional and not-so-traditional wedding elements. Chris and Molly, the principal and office manager here at Choke, got married in June of this year. Chris and Molly stuck with a few of the basic traditions of a wedding, like exchanging rings and cutting the cake together. But they opted to do photos before the ceremony so that they could spend more time with their friends and family, who were invited to enjoy the libations before, during, and after the wedding. Chris and Molly also embraced a music theme for their wedding, starting out by sending posters as save the dates, invitations that were designed to be tickets, and passing out screen printed t-shirts as favors. The crowning glory of their music-themed craft projects was making flowers out of guitar pics for all of the centerpieces at the reception. They were even featured on Hi-Fi Weddings for their clever record store engagement photos. Link: http://hifiweddings.com/2011/09/29/chris-mollys-music-trade/
I got married just a few weeks ago in October. I always knew my wedding would likely be non-traditional, but that fact was cemented when my fiancée, Scott, and I booked a Maryland barn as our venue and began jokingly calling the wedding the “Hoedown of Love.” We decided to keep the easy, no-brainer traditions like “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” As a designer, I knew that I would go the traditional route of sending paper invitations—letterpress printed invitations, no less—even though sending out an Evite would have been much nicer for our wedding budget. I felt as though I’d have to revoke my designer card if I didn’t tackle the challenge of designing my own invitations, and I might as well do something beautiful. For Scott and I, that’s about where the traditions ended. Scott saw the dress when it was purchased (Bad luck? Says who?), we saw each other before the wedding in order to get the photos out of the way, and Scott had two groomswomen in addition to his two groomsmen. Instead of serving filet mignon and chicken, we hired a caterer who cooked wood fired pizzas on the back of his 1950s Ford pickup. We also nixed the garter and bouquet toss. After all, we really didn’t want to have Grandpa see Scott going up my dress in search of a garter with his teeth because his hands were tied behind his back. No thanks. Worse yet, what if Grandma caught the garter and one of the groomsmen had to place it on her upper thigh? Yes. That was a tradition we happily ignored.
Perhaps something old, something new is the best approach to wedding traditions—mixing it up makes for more fun. What traditions have you (or would you) keep or give the old heave-ho?
