Sorry about the lateness of the posting. Things – particularly weather and some spotty power access – happened.
Anyway.
I thought you might all find it interesting to learn a little bit of trivia. Did you know that roughly 40% of all marriage proposals take place between the months of November and February? And the most popular time to propose marriage is Christmas?
Here are a couple other burning questions about engagement you probably never thought to ask. (more…)
The coming week could be very interesting in the ongoing struggle for marriage equality. The Supreme Court is expected to announce which of as many as ten cases regarding marriage equality they will choose to hear. Chances are they will choose to hear at least one or two. Chances are also that they won’t hear all ten. That’s a lot of cases on one issue. Besides, at least one of them, Windsor v United States could, in theory, lead to the court completely demolishing DOMA on constitutional grounds that the entire act violates equal protection… if they decide that way.
Interestingly enough, in one case, Hollingsworth v Perry (which has had two previous incarnations as Perry v Brown and Perry V Schwarzenegger), if the court refuses to hear it, then it’s an automatic equality victory. You see, Hollingsworth v Perry is the case against California’s infamous Proposition 8 outlawing same sex marriage. Two courts, thus far, have ruled that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional under California law. That means if the Supreme Court refuses to hear the case, the lower court’s ruling will go into effect and California will begin issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples in a matter of weeks.
Makes me kind of hope the court doesn’t choose that one.
Whichever cases the court chooses to hear, however they turn out, this space will remain adamantly pro marriage equality.
Nobody has yet managed to explain to me in what way my marriage will be harmed by two men or two women who love one another getting married than it is by the sad travesty of Kim Kardashian’s multi-million dollar, world-televised seventy-two day marriage.
What I can see, and can be appalled by, is the fact that same sex couples – even where they can legally marry in this country – are denied rights and benefits that I take for granted. Rights of visitation in hospitals, of inheritance, of tax benefits, and many more.
In 1954, the Supreme Court struck down the concept of ‘separate but equal’ because while it was always separate, it was virtually never equal. Right now we have a significant segment of our population offered a ‘similar’ but hardly equal version of marriage.
I only hope the current Supreme Court has the courage of their predecessors in 1954.
There’s nothing like a winter wedding. Snow (if you live in an area where it’s common) makes a pretty backdrop for a wedding. And since winter is a far less popular time of the year to marry than spring or summer, it’s quite possible to get extra good deals on halls, catering, and flowers. And with all the decorative items on sale for Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s Eve, etc. it’s easy to get all kinds of pretty sparkly things to make your day beautiful on a budget.
Of course, there are some practical issues to consider, too. Weather is more likely to be stormy. One unexpectedly heavy fall of snow could spell the difference between a full house and lots of empty pews at your ceremony. Since many people travel for the holidays at this time of year, it’s also possible that you’ll wind up with less guests than you’d hoped due to family obligations or used up vacations days that won’t allow people to come out your way.
Once you’ve looked over the pros and cons and decided to set your wedding in the winter months, here are a few ideas to make it extra pretty and seasonally suitable.
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Going shopping for a wedding gown can be an intimidating and confusing process to start. After all, how many of us have tried on a formal gown since Prom? A tiny minority, that’s how many. And then so many women go in with a Vision – complete with a capital Vis – that may or may not have anything to do with the shapes of their bodies, or their usual style.
So how to figure out before you get to the salon with an hour long appointment that maybe mermaid isn’t your best look? Or that ballgowns drown you? Or that strapless does precisely nada for your bosom?
Well, one thing you can do is go to the Bride’s website and check out their virtual dressing room tool. It’s free to use, and can give you good idea of how different sorts of wedding gown styles are likely to look on you. You simply upload a photo of yourself (tips included on how to best do that for the tool), and use over four hundred photos of real wedding gowns to see what your best and worst bets are. Save the pics of the best and worst looks for easy reference. Oh, and one feature I really loved? It tells you whether the gown you’re looking at is available in plus sizes or not. But even if you fall in love with a gown that doesn’t come in your size, chances are someone out there makes one in a similar line that will fit you.
Don’t feel like handing over your email? That’s okay. They also have a series of generic pictures that you can use. Pick the one closest to your body shape, and you’ll still get some valuable winnowing done. You can’t save those photos for later reference, but you can always take another look.
Obviously there’s no substitute for actually seeing gowns on your specific body in real life. No matter how good the program is, it won’t be the same as a three-dimensional, moving, breathing experience. Still, it’s a handy tool to start with if you’re confused about what is going to look good on your figure.
And do try a bit of everything. You never know what surprisingly good look there might be for you.
Besides, if one of the experiments looks bad, who’s going to see it? Just you. Isn’t that better than you and the salon consultant and your entourage?
Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.
For many brides, wedding planning starts with a vision of colors. Red, blue, pink, green, yellow, grey… whatever color combination makes her happy or seems to say something about love and romance to her.
And of course whatever colors you choose, someone loves them and someone else hates them. Some couples compromise if someone close to them has a difficulty with the colors they really wanted in the first place. After all, it might be politic to remove black from the color scheme if it’s going to upset grandma too much, or pink if the best man is uncomfortable with so much as a pink tie. Whether you do that depends on how much the relationship means to you as opposed to how important the color is to you. Only you can decide where your priorities lie.
Me? I wound up more or less avoiding the whole question. I didn’t specifically choose a color scheme, weirdly enough. In the end, the wedding wound up being mostly cream and silver grey with touches of red, which I liked. I didn’t go in saying ‘these are my colors.’ I just picked things I liked… and once I’d picked a couple things, others fell into place. But there were touches of every color of the rainbow at that wedding. Pink, blue, yellow, lavender, even orange made an appearance. I was tremendously pleased with my no color scheme color scheme. It left me open to options that kept the whole look from being too carefully matched for such an informal style of picnic wedding.
But I think if I’d specifically picked wedding colors, they most likely would have involved blue and/or purple. Funny how neither wound up being a major part of the wedding.
So what about you? Do you have an ideal wedding color scheme? A color you would never dream of putting in your wedding? One you love but worry is too cliche to use?
Tell us all about it!
Oh my dearie darlings!
It’s time once again to play Twistie’s Sunday Caption Madness. You all know how this works. I find a picture that’s simply having night terrors searching for a funny caption or six. You provide said captions via the comments function located conveniently at the end of this post. Next week I declare a winner, and we all do a triumphant rhumba down the street.
This week’s image comes from under the floorboards of the Catering Catastrophe file, and it looks a little bit like this:
Ready… set… snark!
Lauren Adkins requests the pleasure of your company at her wedding to a cardboard cutout of Edward Cullen on January 26, 2013 in a wedding chapel somewhere in Las Vegas, NV.
She doesn’t really. You’re not invited. Neither am I. But that’s how she intends to spend the day.
No, the laws haven’t changed to make this a legal ceremony, and she isn’t coming out as a huge Twihard. This is actually a piece of performance art intended to be part of her graduate thesis on how media shapes people’s ideals of the perfect relationship.
Adkins, 24 and a student at the University of Las Vegas finds herself intrigued with how books, films, and television tell us the story of what to look for in a mate. Funnily enough, when the story was picked up by the UK Metro, they entirely missed the point that this was a tongue in cheek piece of her thesis.
Lauren, best of luck with your thesis! Oh, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to wish you sparkles on that special day when you marry your cardboard vampire.