Nuptial Hindsight

I had dinner with my aunt, uncle, and cousin recently. My cousin is starting college and my aunt wanted her to have a good, hearty meal before embarking on her first semester of ramen and cafeteria food. After dinner we were all sitting around telling stories and reminiscing, and my aunt pulled out their wedding album to illustrate a point. Of course we started poking through all the pictures and oohing and ahhing over everyone's silly glasses and magnificent facial hair. After looking through their album, we looked at the pictures from my aunt's parents' wedding. It was a ton of fun--who doesn't like seeing people they love be very, very happy?--but it also reaffirmed my committment to the What Would Grandma and Grandpa Do school of wedding planning.

Looking at wedding pictures a good few decades after they were taken is very instructive, especially when they are narrated by those who have the most invested in what they show. Expectations of weddings have changed since these pictures were taken, and not for the better. The weddings of both my aunt and her parents were certainly not frugal for their day. Both families were middle class or upper middle class, and shared a deeply culturally ingrained sense of what constitutes tasteful, elegant, and proper. That meant pretty dresses, shiny rings, bubbly champagne. But pretty, shiny, and bubbly notwithstanding, they were downright simple compared to the stuff wedding planning couples have to stave off today.

Here's the thing: extreme detail obsession is not tradition. Micro-managed decor is not tradition. Favors are not tradition. Opulant floral flourishes are not tradition. Months of preparative beauty-oriented body modification is not tradition. Chair covers are not tradition. "Themes" are not tradition, unless you consider, "Hooray! We are getting married!" a theme. Not that tradition should be the determining criterion as to whether or not you should include it in your wedding, but these things are new inventions that buoy an industry and are not the prerequisite to the legality of a marriage. Truth is, these things aren't even all that memorable after the fact.

How freeing. If no one can remember this stuff, why stress about it? Why spend time on it? Why pay for it? Here are the things that stood out to my aunt and uncle from looking at their pictures:

--that they looked so, so happy
--that my aunt, like her sisters, her mother, and grandmother, wore the same veil
--that their families were there and seemed to never stop smiling
--that the priest who married them was the same priest who officiated the wedding of her father, who had died when she was a child, and her mother
--that my brother took his job as ringbearer very seriously, and seriousness is always comical in a schoolboy.
--that my aunt's bridesmaids (her sisters and sister-in-law to be) bonded in mutiny, insisting on a shade of blue that looked flattering on them rather than the shade of green my aunt favored

None of those memories was of something that could be bought, designed, or contracted for. If there were favors, elaborate centerpieces, flowing liquor, or anything splashy outlay, no one could remember some thirty years later.