Tradition

Tradition or not?

I wasn’t really sure what I wanted for a wedding when we first started planning. Yet I knew that I never wanted a big white wedding. I never wanted 100 guests. I never wanted all the wedding stress and planning madness, and I certainly didn’t want to spend a lot of money on just one day. I was never one of those girls who dreamt of traditional princess weddings. It simply wasn’t me. But guess what, I got just that!

I had been to enough weddings to know for sure what I didn’t want. I didn’t want big, expensive, kitsch or chichi. I didn’t want really long breaks with nothing for our guests to do. And most of all I didn’t want to glue, tape, wrap, stuff or lick anything myself.

Tradition is a funny thing, it’s something we don’t necessarily believe in, but follow anyway. Some would say the same of marriage. So isn’t it ironic that weddings seem to have more traditions involved than anything else. No matter how traditional or untraditional a wedding may be there are simply some things you can’t get away from.

During my 16 months of wedding planning I found myself often clashing with traditions. I was planning a long distance wedding from Germany, where I lived at the time with my now German husband, yet the wedding was to be held in my hometown Vancouver. Germans have a very different take on weddings, they like things small, discreet, and very traditional. Canadians are more opulent, extravagant and sometimes extremely untraditional. Somewhere there had to be a happy medium, but I wasn’t sure where.

My dress was the first tradition I broke. A big white dress made me look like the Stay Puft marshmallow man. And every other shade of white, off-white, ivory and champagne still made me look like an enormous cupcake. Believe it or not, the slimmer the dress was cut, the bigger it made me look. The only colour that worked was a beautiful shade of cappuccino. So out the window went the idea of a bride all dressed in white!

When we started thinking about our ceremony, I just couldn’t imagine marrying civilly. In Germany, the civil ceremony is the only legal one, and if the couple is religious then they marry a second time in their house of worship. It wasn’t easy to figure out how to combine my traditions, his traditions and our actual wishes all into one. Not to mention my mother’s traditions, his family traditions, and that of our customs and heritages. We thought about running away and getting married on a beach somewhere tropical, but in the end it wouldn’t have made us happy.

The more we thought about what kind of wedding would make us happy, the more we realized it’s the people who participate that make the difference. I couldn’t imagine getting married without all my girlfriends being there or without at least some of our German family & friends. Unfortunately for us, not enough guests were willing and able to come see us marry in the tropics, so the guest list went up, as did the budget, and to even out cost, I sucked it up and glued, taped, wrapped, stuffed and licked everything myself.

As the wedding approached I started getting more and more excited about the little things I once thought nauseating. I wanted to give my guests favours, design my own centerpieces, create our own programs. I thought it would be funny to take dancing lessons and choreograph our first dance. Everything to make this party as enjoyable and fun not only for us, but also for our friends and family. And so I succumbed to the traditional wedding mayhem, and bought my first bridal magazine, 6 months after my engagement.

Living in Germany, it wasn’t easy to organize a traditional bridal shower. And unfortunately this was one tradition that I really missed. I especially missed hearing advice from former brides who share the wisdom they had gathered along the way. I call these ah ha moments, where a bride has a revelation that she takes with her into her new marriage. German women think it’s bad luck to give gifts and celebrate an upcoming marriage beforehand. So it was wedding magazines that I turned to for those ah ha moments. I remember wondering when my ah ha moment would be.

In the end everything about our wedding turned out to be a big mish mash of traditions. A female rabbi married us under a Huppah in a traditional Jewish ceremony intertwined with a civil one as well. The German guests read Hebrew blessings. Over the rainbow by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole replaced traditional Siman Tov & Mazol Tov as we walked back up the aisle. And my dress, although cappuccino, was very princess like.

Our reception was intimate and romantic, given 100 people all squished into a little room, however, with a phenomenal view of downtown Vancouver. We didn’t have a head table but rather a family table. We didn’t do a garter toss, but played German wedding games instead. We opted out of an over the top three tear wedding cake for a divine single layer double chocolate mousse cake and fresh out of the oven chocolate chip cookies. And after the parents boogied down to Hava Nagila, the rest of us Salsa danced the night away.

And as for when I had my ah ha moment, it actually occurred before the whole day even began. At the break of dawn I watched my soon to be husband sneak out of my childhood bedroom the morning of our wedding. We hadn’t wanted to follow tradition and sleep apart the night before. We knew that we would just end up stressing over how the other was doing. And as I watched him drive away, I felt so lucky to know that in spite of our differences, our love was strong enough to start our own traditions now.