Yesterday at the airport while on route from Indy back to Houston, my friend and I stopped by the magazine shop so she could pick up an escape magazine for the relaxing ride back home.While she was looking around, I opened up the most recent issue of Bride Magazine.
Luckily, I mostly kept myself away from Wedding Industrial Complex propaganda while I was planning my own wedding. That stuff is mainly advertisements anyway.
But I was intrigued by one of the stories on the cover: "58 Little Ways to Make Your Wedding Unique."
Yes! I am all in favor of unique weddings. The more weddings you go to, the more cliched they start to feel.
We tried to make our wedding unique with a choreographed first dance, a quilt-wrapping ritual during the ceremony, personalized name tags at the Welcome Picnic, etc.
I was interested in reading about new strategies for making weddings unique.
The magazine's suggestions for making your wedding unique?
Table details.
Yep, that's right.
Here's what they had to say:
"Guest gaze at them all night, so each little accent--place cards, menus, and votives should be a tiny treasure."
Ugh! Do you really want your guests staring at the centerpieces all night because there's nothing better to do?
When we obsess about all the little surface details (details, by the way, which tend to bring in more and more money for the Wedding Industrial Complex), we take time away from figuring out how to genuinely make our weddings unique. What will we say to each other during the ceremony? How will we plan serious fun for our guests? How will we help friends and family from two distinct sides come together and get to know each other?
Those are the kinds of things we should be reading about.
3 comments:
I found your blog a couple of weeks ago while helping gather up more wedding-related material for a friend who recently got engaged.
It's been almost a year since I got to enjoy my own 1,000 dollar wedding. And man was it unique. I loved every minute of it.
Anyways I love your blog and agree with you on so many levels. Especially this one. For us it was all about family and friends and we think that came through and are oh so happy.
Keep up the good work on this blog. I wish I would have broken down and blogged more about the process when I could. Ciao!
The ironic part, too, is that all the suggestions in the magazines regarding adding "unique" touches to a wedding suddenly become the mainstream thing. Unique is not about copying ideas in a magazine, it's about doing something that both people in the couple can proudly say is so "us." That's my goal for my wedding in June.
*hanging head* I bought that issue! & an issue of The Knot! BUT, I don't plan on copying anything right out of the magazines. I'm pulling ideas that I can then make even unique-r myself!
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