Dear Wedding Skulls

I LOVE Christmas – it’s such a magical time of the year. Every Christmas I feel like there’s the surreal faery dust in the air. It’s just amazing.

I want to get married at Christmas, preferably on Christmas eve but at the very least two or three days before Christmas. My husband thinks it’s kind of silly, but he’s happy to go along with it.

When we told my parents, they had a COW! They couldn’t believe we’d want to get married the week of Christmas. “Everyone will have to travel during the Christmas rush to get to your wedding!” They said, “The holidays are stressful enough without having a wedding too!” “If you have it on Christmas Eve, no one will come.”

No matter how much I assure them that I’ll do all the work and it won’t be stressful at all, they’re still insisting we change the date to something way back in November! What do you think? Should we had a magical Christmas Eve wedding or do something else?

First of all, have you seen Sassy and Ian’s beautiful Gothed-Up Christmas Wedding? If not, go and have a look and read what she says about planning a Christmas wedding?

I can understand totally why you want a Christmas wedding. You’re thinking of how beautiful it will be:

• everything covered in snow
• towering Christmas trees covered in sparkling lights
• rich, delicious food
• everyone gathered together to celebrate
• Christmas carols (mine would be heavy metal Christmas carols, but each to their own)
• Winter colors, wonder and magic

However, for many people, Christmas means something totally different:

• bankrupting themselves paying for obligatory presents
• Travelling long distances on crowded roads, airlines, buses and trains.
• Shopping till all hours
• Extra hours at work to pay for all the Christmas cheer
• Dieting in preparation for the gluttony to follow
• MASSIVE food bills and lots of cooking that needs to be done
• Cleaning the house for guests
• Sharing their house with many guests, some of whom have Children. Loud Children.
• Stress induced by all of the above

Your parents have a legitimate concern. Asking a family member to squeeze a wedding – especially a wedding they’d have to travel for – during this hectic schedule just doesn’t sit right.

You haven’t considered the fact that with everybody travelling over this period, a large number of your guests WON’T be able to come?

Look, the reason Christmas is magical is NOT because it’s Dec 25th, but because all your loved ones are gathered together and totally celebrating being with each other. That’s what gives Christmas that surrealistic faery quality (I know what you mean about that).

Christmas should be a time for people to be with and appreciate their own families, and I think you should remember that before you ask them to spend time and energy celebrating yours. Weddings DO take time and energy, even if you do EVERYTHING yourself. A would have to RSVP, arrange transport to your wedding, find a babysitter, buy a present, arrange transport home again and attend any pre-wedding parties (like a bachelorette party). While that’s not much on its own, add that to the list above, and you have one stressed-out and resentful guest.

Surely there’s a compromise between having a Christmassy wedding (complete with that faery magic) and having your wedding at a time when everyone you love is more able to celebrate with you? Even moving the wedding back to the first or second week of January would give you that wonderful Christmas season while ensuring everyone’s holiday plans have more or less finished.

Really, what does the date matter? It’s the fun you have and the memories you create and the man you marry, isn’t it? And you can have that magic 365 days of the year.

Hello, poor neglected wedding blog. My, how I have missed you!

Two good friends of mine are getting married soon, in a smallish ceremony with gothic overtones. They have one beautiful daughter, and another child on the way.

This raised the question in my mind. How do you include children in the wedding who haven’t been born yet?

The taboo against been married while pregnant (thereby rubbing in the face of all your well-mannered guests that you DID in fact do the dirty before the vows) still exists in most western society. And while us alternative types think this is all silliness, it might not be silliness to some of the guests you intend on inviting.

If this is the case with your little lump of joy, I might be able to offer a few tips to create a perfect wedding while pregnant.

• Choose a floaty, comfortable dress that accentuates your belly. Instead of trying to flatten that lump with corsetry and lacing, why not be a fertility goddess, a manifestation of your love for one another. I think your child would love to look back on the wedding photos and see that round tummy and think, “I was there.”
• Black is slimming – I’d love to see a beautiful soon-to-be mother bride wearing a floor-length, black empire dress. Gorgeous!
• Take time out for a family portrait. You, your partner, and your children. All your children.
• If you’re going to be heavily pregnant on your wedding day, you need to arrange the day so you’re not running around, being stressed and on your feet all the time. The wedding day needs to be low stress, low maintenance, and fun but not overwhelming. The last thing you want is to do harm to yourself or the baby.
• Acquire some ladies- or men-in-waiting, to attend your needs leading up to and on the day of the wedding.
• All those DIY projects you want to get done? Re-assess the importance of all those tasks on your wedding-to-do list. A wedding is just one day, a party, but planning now for your new baby’s future is more important.
• If any of your guests voice their disdain for you being pregnant on your wedding day, you need to speak up and tell them that’s not okay. Your child is being brought up in a family of love and understand, and you should not have your wedding day tainted with ill feelings towards your pregnancy. Having a child is a wonderful, beautiful event and should be viewed as such. Threaten to remove naysayers from the guest list, and follow up on your threats if you feel certain people are still being inappropriate and offensive. If you wouldn’t tolerate that talk from strangers, don’t accept it from friends and family. Don’t suffer these bad vibes!
• Mention your children in your vows. Vow to stay true to them and raise them in a home of love and understanding. Write your vows on paper and preserve them in an album for your children to read when they’re older.
• Write down your Doctor’s details and have the paper handy with a helpful friend in case something goes wrong on the wedding day.
• Choose a pregnancy-friendly menu.
• Add some awesome alternative baby clothes to the wedding registry list (if you made one). I love Metal Kids.
• And above all, take the time out from wedding planning to enjoy time with your husband before the baby comes, and to marvel over the miracle of life that’s happening inside you.

CDH and I are moving into a new house in 16 days.  This is the first time we will be living in a house without flatmates, so all the interior decorating falls to me (this is not a bad thing). I’m thinking a lot about how to tie the somewhat worn furniture we have to the fresh, new, gorgeous house we will be habitating. I’ve been wondering about themes, and that got me on to thinking about wedding themes.

I’ve always been of the school of thought that any event – especially an event as large and important to you as a wedding – needs a theme, if for no other reason then to tie your thoughts together in your mind, and help you decide which of your seven-million ideas to use and which to discard.

But is a theme actually necessary? I always advise brides and grooms to think of their theme as one of the first activities of wedding planning. But what if that’s limiting? What if that’s taking precious time away from thinking about the complexities of marriage, and placing the focus on the wedding “aesthetic”.

I do think aesthetics are important, because I’m a girl and I like to look at pictures of our wedding and think “dam, we looked kick-ass!” But do some couples worry overly about theme and aesthetics and creating a “look” and a “feel” and lose something of the aspect of their wedding?

Can’t a theme simply be “stuff we like”? Couldn’t a theme be “hey, we’re getting married. How cool is that?”

These awesome ducks can dive down about 8m before popping back up the surface like rockets. They're so awesome!

CDH planned a surprise honeymoon with his mother (who’s one cool lady) which he accidentally spoiled by telling me where we were going about two hours before we left We went to Queenstown, NZ, for two days – a place I’d never visited before and CDH had visited briefly fifteen years ago and had been in a bad mood at the time.

View of the shotover river from the window of our honeymoon suite.

From my honeymoon experiences, I offer you five tips for planning an awesome honeymoon!

Dear Wedding Skulls

We have a real dilhema here! Our wedding is in a local pub, and the catering staff have been great so far, coming up with meal solutions for the gluten-free and vegetarian guests. But we have two vegan guests, and … well, the cooks are real ‘meat and potatoes’ fellas, and they don’t seem to get vegan. What do we do?

Ah, those wacky vegans. Always messing up the best-laid plans.

(I’m kidding, btw. Some of my close friends are vegan and I totally admire them. And they cook awesome food! Vegan chocolate cake ftw!)

Vegans are pretty used to going hungry at weddings. Not because no one cares about them (although I suppose that is a possibility) but with all the stress and hassles and running around before a wedding, remembering to check the caterer has a specific ‘vegan’ meal prepared often falls by the wayside.

And when you DO remember the special vegan dish, and the chef cooks a special vegan dish, the wait staff aren’t told about it, and your vegan guest gets served the meat-encrusted platter, and goes hungry anyway.

OR your chef and your wait staff are told about the vegan, but the chef doesn’t understand what vegan food is, and your vegan ends up with a meat-or-animal-product infested platter, and goes hungry anyway.

Poor vegan

I would bring your chef a short (one page long) description of what a vegan is – in writing, so he can read up on vegans and not rely on your rushed verbal description. I would also find him a couple of vegan recipes, just so he can see the kind of thing vegans eat as a meal (to avoid having your vegan served a plate of boiled cabbage (this happened to one of my vegan friends at a pub once).

Alternatively, you could order in takeout from a popular vegan restuarant. Just make sure it’s served on a plate, not a takeout container. Way to make the hippie feel stink

Also, talk to your vegan friends before the event. Most vegans eat before going out anyway (too many years of paying $15 for boiled cabbage) so make sure they know – and are happy with – you preparing an extra meal for them.

Also, don’t forget the dessert. Vegan’s won’t be able to eat your awesome chocolate-encrusted velvet cake. Make sure they have something cow-free and tasty to treat themselves too. The same goes for chocolately wedding favors.

Good luck! It’s great to hear you taking pains to make your friends comfortable!

The Wedding Times be tough, so the industry works in overdrive, and we get suckered in. Those GORGEOUS pictures splashed across every bridal magazine and wedding blog really convince us we’re not doing it properly if we don’t have all of those exquisite details planned – down to the last monogrammed napkin.

And – I’ll admit – it’s fun. It’s almost too much fun. It’s like decorating a dolls house. You get caught up in the fantasy and the ‘omigod how epic is that!’ feelings, and before you know if you’ve sped $500 on chocolate wedding favors and you’re eating baked beans for a month.

So for your reading and purse-string pleasure, I present Wedding Skulls’ Top Ten List of Wedding ‘Must Have’s’ You Can Do Without’.