So You're EnGAYged

When we got married in England, we had two people in our wedding party: our brothers. Our Best Men, they were amazing. And for their wedding gifts we took the more ‘traditional’ route of giving them their wedding accessories: purple tie and cuff links for Alex’s brother, green tie and cuff links for my brother. Sorted.

Our wedding party in California, however, is much bigger: we each have a maid of honor, three bridesmaids plus my best friend is officiating. That’s 9 ladies total.

For ages now, we’ve known that we want our guests to wear white knots for marriage equality during the wedding. My maid of honor dutifully tied them and stored them in a clean Tupperware box months ago for safe keeping on the big day. We haven’t quite figured out how we’ll distribute them–in baskets and handed out before the ceremony or on the table during the reception–but they’ll be there. Regardless, we knew we wanted to get fancier ones for our ladies (and probably our parents & siblings as well) from Holden Marks, The Official White Knot Collection. While I’d love it if more than 10% of the net proceeds went to marriage equality campaigns, 10% is something and the lasting awareness even more. (I’ve also just emailed them to find out what their quantity discount is as $15/pin is a lot times 9 +)

White Knot Pins by Holden Marks

But what to go with the pins? Are the pins enough?

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Photo Credit: Button Bouquet by kottonkandy52 on Etsy

There’s something really tangible about planning a wedding– the fabrics, the colors, the details, the food. But when you’re planning your wedding with 6,000 miles between you and your wedding location, things can get digital quick. Now obviously I love me some internets but picking out a table cloth color or ‘getting a feel’ for the centerpieces just ain’t the same. Luckily, I’m not planning this wedding on my own, 6,000 miles away from both my partner or my family. Alex and I are together in London picking out stuff bridesmaid favors and our save the dates and sending them to my maid of honor and my mom back home while their sorting out things like the wedding shower and bachelorette parties. And they’ve been brilliant in getting things in order–venue, caterer, white knots, jam, hotel rooms–but still, sometimes, I get the blues.

I want to TOUCH the button bouquet that arrived at my parents’ house last week and PRANCE around in the living room with it. I want to SEE the jars of strawberry jam my grandma has made and FEEL the fabric she has picked out for the lids. I want to meet with the caterer in person and walk Alex around the ceremony site in my hometown. And I definitely don’t want to figure out how to print, label and post wedding invitations in two countries OR not try on my wedding dress until a week before the wedding. But, that’s the way it is.

So, what’s helped with the long distance wedding planning blues so far? Here are a few things I can credit for my current levels of happy wedding sanity:

• Wedding Blogs: I think it’s a combination of seeing that people get married ALL the time and that every wedding is different that continues to buoy me. There are so many ways to get hitched, so many options to seal that union and decorate that table that I am able to fight off the “How are we going to make this one different from the last?!?!?” and find a multiplicity of ideas that I can easily share digitally with our loved ones in California.
• Skype: Sometimes, I just need to SEE my folks, my friends, the stuff I’ve bought on Etsy and had shipped to somebody’s house in California. And sometimes I just want to hear that voice, be able to double over in laughter, and make silly faces. All totally necessary in any wedding planning process.

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Designs by C. Bors

As I write this over in England, I’m listening to the newly-popular-to-me Lady Antebellum and dreaming of when we can possibly incorporate ‘Something ‘Bout a Woman’ into our special California mountain day. With our website up-to-date for our oh-so-awesome second wedding, it is indeed time to email out the Save the Dates! Or, should I say, “Lasso the Dates”…

Our university friend, first person to cotton on to the fact that we were dating, and gorgeous bridesmaid is the mastermind behind this fantastic array of Save the Date choices: the heels with the spurs, the “Californ-i-a,” the concept that I would actually be doing some boot scootin’ on my wedding day (hunt for cowgirl boots shortly to commence!).

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Whenever I thought about a wedding as a kid, I didn’t really think that I’d have two weddings to plan, let alone two in one year. It has actually become a bit of joke with our families. Alex’s mum has decided that with two women, you just have to have two of everything: two dresses (just for me), two rings (we thought about a ring exchange for both weddings), two bachelorette parties (one for each country), two cakes at each wedding, so on and so forth.

My mom and dad are blaming it on my birthdays: when I was 3 ˝ my dad started celebrating my ‘un-birthday,’ the day that marked when I was officially 6 months older. With a Christmas birthday, I think my parents felt a little sorry for me so I got a summer ‘un-birthday’ too—along with multiple celebrations in December with much of our family scattered around different parts of California. Regardless of our of multiple celebratory tendencies, Alex and I like a good party and, well, we want to celebrate our love with everyone we love—no matter which English-speaking country they happen to live in.

Aside from the long-distance complications, this brings us to another dilemma: how do you throw two unique ceremonies and celebrations that are at once relevant to the location and the people and retain the essence of who we are and hold as the center of the day that we are getting married? So far, we’ve attempted this balance by remembering the key words that come to us when we think about us getting married: love, acceptance, and people. (Dancing does come into that equation for me, too, although it is less a catalyst for how to plan a wedding and more a requirement of the day. I know that some of you might not feel this same way, but I’m not hitched ’til I get to dance afterward!)

Those three words breakdown what our day is about: our love manifesting through a union and a commitment to be with one another as a family; the acceptance of ourselves, each other, and others, as human beings and a same-sex couple; and the people in our lives who have made us who we are, share with us in our joys and sorrows, and who want as much time as possible with on such a momentous day.

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Just engayged!

On June 16th, 2009, I introduced myself to you for the first time: a new blogger, recently engaged, and brimming with wacky ideas for our (two) weddings. Since then, you may have heard about what happened when our first wedding venue got sold, how we picked our diamond free wedding rings, seen the gorgeousness of Hawes & Curtis button-ups for women, giggled over our REAL UK Civil Partnership withme, and had the chance to meet my wife.

Bundled up for Christmas -- 4 months to the UK wedding!

You’ve been alongside me while we prepared to get married in England on April 17th, 2010, and I’m back again to plan our second wedding on October 16th, 2010–this time in California, USA!

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That moment right there. That moment was the moment when I realized how equally cool wedding cake was and understood just how different our two countries were about wedding cake. For starters, that’s not a fluffy cake we’re cutting into, it’s a fruit cake made thick with dried fruit and soaked in tons of brandy. Secondly, that’s some damn thick icing and there’s ribbon at the bottom. And, no one expect us to a) cut a slice of it out or b) feed it to each other! But see, that right there again, that’s me being an American with my own experiences of wedding cake. You could be anywhere in the world. The great thing about being a bi-national couple–and planning two weddings–is that you get to have more than one cake. (And sometimes four…)

If I haven’t already said this enough times: Alex and I love food. Planning-our-holidays-around-where-we-get-to-eat kind of love food. So, designing our wedding cake(s) was just another bonus in the wedding planning process and, with our focus being to have each piece of our wedding have special meaning to us, we wanted our cakes to say the same.

British Cakes

A month after I proposed, Alex and I found ourselves at a family gathering for her grandma’s 80th birthday. Her aunt had made a gorgeous fruit cake with icing roses on it and individual fruit cakes (the size of a can of beans!) for each of us to take home after the party. Not knowing that her aunt was such a cake enthusiast–or so good at making them!– we hadn’t considered a family member making our UK wedding cake. But after that day, the idea was sealed. We knew our colours were purple and green and that we wanted real flowers. From the initial discussions we threw around different ideas–like having purple icing; but her aunt quickly cautioned us against having all of our guests having purple tongues on our wedding night–and finally settled on a 2-tier fruit cake with white icing, a thick purple ribbon with a thin green ribbon, fresh flowers on a silver board. For our cake toppers, we found old letterpress stamps of ‘A & E’ at Spitalfields Market in London.

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