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Weddings and Rice

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As I was walking out of the co-op the other day, I looked down to see a large splotch of rice in the parking lot. The kind of splotch that can only be achieved by having your bag of rice break open while you’re carrying it to the car (you can guess why I know this).  My first thought was that the local birds would be happy but then I remembered that supposedly uncooked rice is bad for birds, which is why they throw birdseed now at weddings.

Then when I got home, I discovered that YA had received TWO “save-the-date” cards.

Wedding reminder #3 was when I was watching Cake Boss that night and one of the bakers (sorry I don’t watch this enough to know any of their names) was celebrating a milestone anniversary with a big party and a wedding cake. When the couple began to cut the cake and feed each other, I cringed, hoping they wouldn’t smash the cake into each other’s faces.  I detest that.

So all these wedding reminders in one day made me think about weddings how the traditions have changed over the years. My first wedding, which was completely orchestrated by my mother, was fairly traditional.  Church, gown, reception, cake (unsmashed), lots of people I didn’t know.  My second wedding was the exact opposite, we met the judge at  Good Earth restaurant and were married at the table with our server, Philip and the server from the next section, Sarah, as our witnesses.  Honeymoon at Day tons that afternoon.  I am much more fond of my Good Earth wedding memories than my traditional ones so it makes me wonder why so many brides and bridegrooms adhere so stickily to all the “musts” when getting married.  Why not do something different, stretch their boundaries, find things that are meaningful instead of just traditional. Those of you with psychology degrees, any ideas?

If you were planning your wedding today, how would you like it to go? (Like all good fantasies, money is no object.)

69 thoughts on “Weddings and Rice”

  1. can i have a wedding on TOI 1338b ?

    that would make it memorable and can i marry my dog?
    i think my dog is the one best able to tolerate my stuff
    dogs die after about 10 years and maybe that’s the key to happiness

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        1. Of course really is marrying your dog any worse than marrying a hologram? Because there’s that guy in Japan who did that a couple years back.

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  2. Our son and DIL had a quite traditional wedding. I don’t know Daughter’s opinion about weddings, but I imagine she would want a fairly tradional one. I would just advise her to opt for the simplest possible.

    The son of a friend of ours sent out texts one Saturday telling people to show up at the Dunn County Courthouse at a time later in the day to see them get married. It was the first inking anyone had about their getting married. When the guests who could make it arrived, they found the groom in a tux, and the bride in a formal white wedding dress,. The JOP married them, and then they all went to the couple’s farm home for a meal.

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    1. I worked with somebody in San Diego who invited people out to a ranch for Halloween, costumes at all, and then when everybody got there they They found out it would be a wedding. Apparently it was a huge blowout. Wish I had been there.

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  3. My parents set the bar pretty low as far as weddings go. They eloped in 1942 and didn’t tell anyone they were married for several months. It was easy to keep it a secret since dad was shipped to the East coast and then to England shortly after the wedding

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        1. I can’t answer for Renee, but my parents did exactly the same thing. They expected my mother’s parents to disapprove of the wedding, primarily because my dad was an artist. My mother’s dad didn’t think an artist could support a family during the Great Depression.

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        2. If she announced she was married, she couldn’t have finished college. She had one semester left, and Mankato State didn’t allow women students to be married.

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        3. One of those puzzling relics of the past. Men could do anything while married. Presumably women were considered just soon-to-be-mothers and unfit for any other role in life. What a waste of talents.

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  4. Planning a wedding is generally the domain of the bride and/or her mother but when my elder daughter got married, it was in the ice hotel in northern Sweden near the arctic circle. That was something her husband-to-be had always wanted. We weren’t there. We stayed behind to watch our two granddaughters for a week so that our younger daughter and her husband could be there.

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        2. She says that the formal Swedish Lutheran Church only allows women pastors in rural areas. She is from northern Minnesotawas raised in and became a pastor in the Covenant Church, which is a renegade sect that broke off from the Swedish State sponsored Lutheran Church in the 1800’s. How she ended up as both a Lutheran and Covenant pastor I have no idea.

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  5. My first two weddings were rather unconventional, to say the least. The first one took place in Greenland and was performed by a holier than thou young Catholic, Air Force priest. I have written about that wedding on the trail before. The second one took place at the Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul and was performed by a female minister that neither of us knew. I don’t even know what faith she professed, I’m guessing Lutheran of some stripe. The chances of a third wedding are slimmer than a snowball’s chance in hell.

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  6. The whole thing about not throwing rice because the birds that eat it will explode is total bunkum that began with a stupid Ann Landers column in 1969.

    I am hostile toward everything in the conventional wedding ceremony except the kiss. I love the kiss. Everything else can go.

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        1. I completely understand which is why am a little embarrassed that I didn’t realize the facts behind the rice story. Every year around the holidays, at least three or four times, I have to explain to someone that no, the cat is not gonna die from eating a small poinsettia plant

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        2. While poinsettias are only mildly toxic to cats and dogs, I’d still discourage them from eating it. But yes, the dangers of poinsettias is much hyped. Once false information starts circulating on the internet and and amplified by newspapers, it’s damn near impossible to eradicate it. I’m constantly amazed at the amount of false information that gets shared over and over again on FB, even by reasonably intelligent people that I know.

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  8. Step-son’s wedding back in April was quite un-traditional, and everything about it had meaning – the vows, the location, though being a destination wedding meant not as many people could attend, and they did another reception later. A favorite niece who married in August had a more traditional wedding, but outdoors near Hastings (Carpenter Nature Center), and was also perfectly lovely (with great dancing after dinner).

    My first wedding took place in my in-laws’ back yard in Great Neck, NY, and only my folks and sister were there from my “side”. (I shudder now to think of how hard this must have been for my parents,) It was small, intimate, and full of things that had meaning for the two of us, but it was all wrong in some way – while I don’t regret doing it (because it got me where I apparently needed to go), I would certainly do things differently now.

    I eloped for the second time around. I highly recommend this to anyone who is trying to keep hold of how things go, but again, you leave out a lot of people. I’ve considered having a big party on some round-numbered year, maybe re-do vows or something, and give people the party we never had, but… meh.

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  9. Wedding planning is so much different now. As in VS’ post – you can send out “hold the date” cards, do the invitations online – heck, do everything online at the couples’ website! You find out how they met, who proposed and how it went, and get connected to the gift registry. Sigh…

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    1. We’ve attended the more or less elaborate weddings of four young couples during the last three years. The common denominator for each of them was that they have dispensed with the nicety of acknowledging the wedding gifts. In one case, the wedding registry requested payment for their lodging at an expensive Hawaiian resort, green fees for rounds of golf, and nightly dinners and drinks during their two week honeymoon. Our gift totaled $240.00, and we never heard a peep.

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      2. anyone who asks to have their expensive hotel greens fees and dinner/drinks in hawaii are very suspect to begin with

        sometimes people’s children don’t understand the privilege they have been awarded. i’ll bet they learn but likely if they get to plug into high level jobs with pay to allow them to live high they may have to wait for the occasion to reflect a bit. spoiled little twits are too common today, maybe they always have been but the social network thing the age group populates is la la land and the all think the kardashians are role models

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  10. I am way late for “Rise and Shine”, Baboons,

    We are awaiting my son’s wedding plans after they announced their engagement last week. It would not surprise me if they just go to a JOP and be done with it. But we will see.

    My first wedding was the classic small town Iowa, Tea-totalers’ special (only the Catholics had alcohol at a reception/dance). There were 200 people there and it all was overwhelming. I had 7 wedding showers, which consigned me to a lifetime of thank you notes and gifts I did not want. The wedding itself was complete with several embarrassing and unwanted relatives who I did not want there, but who came to all weddings whether they were invited or not. It was just humiliating to have to admit kinship with them. Third cousin Herbie got arrested after the wedding for something like disturbing the peace.

    The second wedding was very small, family only, no gifts. It was much more satisfying.

    To quote Plain Jane, “ The chances of a third wedding are slimmer than a snowball’s chance in hell.” Should Lou meet his maker before I meet mine, I will live as a “widow woman.” I don’t care to make the adjustments and get used to anyone else ever again.

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    1. That reminds me for reasons beyond my ken of a recording my father had years ago, a small 45, with a song titled “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane”.

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        3. Oh, I am not pulling your leg. It is advice from Husband’s stepmother. She is sort of like Miss Maaners and knows all there is about etiquette.

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      2. I have always heard this, as well. I plan to follow this no matter what the plans, and I have my beige dress selected. If they have a formal wedding (which I doubt—neither one has any interest in a church setting) it will be in Milwaukee which is her home town. Her father is very disabled, and for him to participate, they will need to be there.

        Lou and I lived together for some time before getting married. We would have been happy to leave it there, but both our mothers threw tantrums and fits (as in my mother kept us up one night during a visit to my house, sobbing and wailing over our fallen state). They were relentless. We got married to shut them up, which is not a great reason to get married. Needless to say, the relationship with both our mothers has been strained for many reasons, but the demands to marry is a great example of that.

        I will wear beige and respect their wishes.

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  11. I have been asked in the distant past by our local Catholic diocese to evaluate couples with developmental disabilities to determine if they should be married in the church. I gave them the go ahead and they had very fine marriages indeed.

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  12. When I got married, I initially made the mistake of thinking it was, at least in part, “my” wedding. Silly me. I was promptly instructed that my role would be to shut up and follow orders issued by the bride-to-be and her mother. The event was tailored to the wishes of a whole lot of people I had never met, people whose ideas about traditions superseded any notions or values I held.

    Many decades later I was amazed by the courage of a young woman (a friend of my daughter’s) who was planning her wedding. People kept telling her she “had” to do things in a certain way. She kept vetoing their demands, saying, “That’s obscenely expensive, and I’m not going to do it.” She stuck to her convictions and got a wedding that was (mostly) true to her values.

    I understand that my feelings about traditional weddings are extreme and not shared by many folks. Being a wedding photographer,which I was for a year, only increased my hostility to traditional weddings.

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  13. When Robin and I decided to get married in 1970, we had known each other for about six months. Having decided, we wanted to get on with it and told our parents that we thought a month was enough time to plan the event. They prevailed upon us to give them a little more time, so we made it three months. That allowed time for Robin to sew a dress and for an art professor friend of Robin’s family to design and cast our rings.

    We weren’t affiliated with a church, didn’t want a church wedding and didn’t want to be drawn into any of the conditions sometimes required of couples seeking a church wedding. It was always our intention to keep the event simple and in our control. As it happened, although Robin’s Dad was a professor at Carleton College, he had a divinity degree and had been a minister when Robin was a baby. We asked him to marry us, thereby setting a precedent that Robin’s two sisters subsequently followed.

    The wedding took place on an island on the Carleton campus on a sunny morning. (We had initially wanted to get married at dawn but cooler heads prevailed.) Picture a cluster of people, and also the family dog clustered on this little island which in those days held more trees and greenery than it does today and which was connected to the landward side by a charming little wooden bridge. The reception was held in Robin’s parent’s back yard and, since it was morning, the refreshments were more along the line of fresh fruit and bundt cakes. Most of the guests, were family and friends of our parents. Some of my friends that summer were picking lemons in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. About noon, Robin and I drove off for our honeymoon in Estes Park, Colorado, where we stayed in the family cabin of a college friend of Robin’s.

    The total cost of our wedding, including our honeymoon, may have run into the hundreds of dollars

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    1. I know that little island. I have been there many times during my Carlton years. I didn’t realize that Robin’s dad taught at Carleton. Would I know him?

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      1. Robert Wood. He taught in the religion department. Tim Lloyd made our rings. Besides the Lloyds, attendees at our wedding were Dick and Barbara Crouter, Bard and Charlotte Smith, Perry and Judy Mason and probably others I can’t remember.

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        1. For those of you who didn’t go to Carleton, those were all faculty members and spouses. There were other guests of course.

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        2. what did perry mason teach?
          i always feel for people who had a perfectly good name until the world changed and they now are named after a famous person.

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        3. And I always feel sorry for those kids whose parents do it to them on purpose. I had a classmate in junior high whose name was Diane Hood and her younger brothers name was Robin.

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  14. my second wedding was the way to go
    debbie had been my 2 kids day care director at the time of my separation from when she and i started dating.
    we had a kid and then another then on the third one decided it would be ok to get married. we were going to disneyland at christmas time so hiring a person to marry us and a classical violinist to come to the boardwalk down in disneyland on 1/1/01 at 1:01 parents and one friends family showed up and my 4 1/2 kids all participated and we rollerblader afterwards.

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  20. I wanted to get married at Disneyworld with just our parents there, then we’d run off to our honeymoon. The Disneyworld wedding would be fully planned by someone else, I’d arrive in my dress, and it would all cost $3k. But I married above my station and had to have pomp and circumstance for $6k. The experience of planning a wedding against my dream basically gave me wedding PTSD and I now write wedding planning articles for disabled folks such as myself. No longer can I stomach wedding reality TV shows. BTW – just got married once. I won’t do it again. lol.

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