Saturday, January 12, 2013

Traditions: A spectrum

While looking over some ideas for what our ceremony will look like, I was struck by the number of decisions we have made thus far related to keeping or breaking wedding traditions. In a lot of ways our plans can be separated easily into the traditional and non-traditional categories, but I find myself struggling with the "gray area" details I have yet to pin down. First, let's review the easily categorized wedding moments:

Some wedding traditions I'm all for
-a white dress
-bouquet chucking
-not letting Vader see me in the dress until the day of the wedding
-dances with our parents
-an announcement of us as "husband and wife"
-the 4 "somethings"

Some wedding traditions we'll be leaving out
-the garter toss
-addressing invitations to "Mr. and Mrs. Man's-first-name Man's-last name"
-being married in a church/by a religious figure
-any part of the ceremony involving visual representation of our lives joining (sand ceremony, unity candle, etc.)
-any referral ever to us as "man and wife"

Some of these I feel strongly about as a woman, some as a somewhat religious person, and frankly some because they're fun. At any rate, we are fairly evenly split between conforming to and bucking against typical wedding traditions.

This leaves me the dilemma of choosing whether I want to embrace the traditional or the non-traditional for things like our processional/recessional music or vows. We plan on writing our own vows (expect a corny love poem with a lot of rhyming from me while Vader schools me with his romanticism), but I am pondering incorporating the traditional vows before or after our individual input. I am at a complete loss for the music, on the other hand. As of now we are equally likely to walk in to hymns as we are to Justin Bieber. Anything but Pachelbel's Canon at the behest of MOH Moxie.

Perhaps we will walk in and out to "Tradition(s?)" from Fiddler on the Roof and avoid the whole decision.

1 comment:

  1. My favorite processional I've heard in a non-church based weddings is Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" without the words (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6OgZCCoXWc), but I also really love Mouret's "Rondeau" (which you may also not like if you're a Downton Abbey fan, since it's the Masterpiece Theatre song) and Handel's Finale from Water Music. I guess it all depends on how fast you want to walk...

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