This Tuesday Tribute is a little venting session and a little focus on the important details of weddings and marriages!Today is exactly five months away from the big day!
The day i move from Miss Pancakes to Mrs. Pancakes!
Right now according to my handy dandy countdown:
I have 150 days, 12 hours, 3 minutes and as of right now 35 seconds to marrying my best friend and the seconds continue to tick away!
Generally we have the biggest things completed, the venue, the dress and we are plowing along with other tasks. But to be honest i am not a stressed out bride as most brides are, which i believe makes me sort of "whatever" about the whole wedding process. I am excited about getting married to Mr. Pancakes and continuing our lives as Team Pancakes!
However, the more wedding blogs i come across and more posts i read, the more i realize most of these girls are insane and overly involved in their wedding process. These girls appear to be consumed with all things wedding! The more posts i read the more irritated i become at how these girls allow themselves to become soooooooooooooooo overwhelmed and stressed out that nothing matters except for the wedding planning.
I just hope that they are also planning the post-wedding-THE MARRIAGE! Maybe i am a little bitter---that's not even the right word--but maybe a little jaded because i feel like so many girls focus on ALL these unnecessary aspect of the wedding like the invitation. I was on the weddingbee.com and it appears that every single bride on there is attempting to out-do the other with the details of their wedding.
Or copying each other's ideas!
My question of the day is how many pieces of paper do you need to invite someone to a wedding?
Who really needs all that extra paper including: SAVE THE DATE, FORMAL INVITATION, RSVP CARDS, RECEPTION CARDS, ENCLOSURE CARDS--what happened to going GREEN people??!! Just because they suggest all these items does not mean you REALLY need them!
There is a lack of respect for the most important part of the wedding invitation that of the actual invitation: asking guests to join you in the celebration of marriage between you and your beloved! Truth be told, most people only care about that aspect of the wedding invitation anyway.
Over the last couple of months (since really searching wedding blogs), i have found that there is an increased focus on unnecessary aspects of the wedding planing which bothers me. Now don't get me wrong, DETAILS are a significant part of the wedding however i feel like TOO MUCH emphasis is placed on these details unnecessarily.
The commercialization of MARRIAGE is part of our society and hence online. But planning my own wedding has made me aware of the amount of money that wedding vendors and providers make. How everything is marked up because it a wedding and how society places pressure on certain things as a REQUIREMENT to plan the perfect wedding. The biggest diamond ring, the most expensive dress and shoes! Flowers all over the ceremony and reception sights. The wedding industry has commercialized marriage to such a degree that the sacredness of marriage has been eliminated!
Perhaps all of this came forth because recently we were in couples ministry at our church and after being around couples that have been married for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, MARRIAGE is really put into perspective! Some details are definitely more important than what our wedding invitations look like and or how our tables are decorated and or how big my engagement ring is. Most of these couples the detail that spoke volumes to me was the simple wedding bands that each of them wore. A simple wedding band is the only detail that i need to see to put everything into perspective. As i reflected about marriage and the wedding planning process, some of the important details for me include but not limited to:
1) The vow that Mr. Pancakes and i will make to each other 150 days, 11 hours, 42 minutes and 50 seconds and as of right now 35 seconds
2) The details of bringing our families and friends together to celebrate our marriage is significant!
3) The joining of our two families
4) The joining of Mr. Pancakes and i as a family!
These are some of the details that i am focusing on during this time as we plan our wedding towards MARRIAGE!
This was a long blog post but sometimes you need to get it out!
Don't get me wrong, I am not a hater--brides should do what they want to do--focus on whatever details they believe are important for them and their significant others! But i feel like it is my civic duty to write about the commercialization of MARRIAGE and the need to pay attention to the important details during the
wedding planning process and not get lost in all the other stuff which is just commercial!
The wedding is only one day but marriage is forever (cliché but so true!)
I want to send a shout out to Alida, a new follower to my blog, who has been married for 29years! Go Alida! You give me something to aspire to!
5 comments:
In my culture you are supposed to have a simple band so that all brides are equal. So I'm very used to seeing this in the people around me and it would feel weird to have anything different. I guess I don't really understand why people would want anything else... my teeny tiny ering is already flashy enough.
For our invites, we used recycled paper and we only have the invite, a belly band, the map to our venue (its hard to find), and an RSVP postcard. We really tried to cut down on the paper!
And I feel you about the extra "details"..while I do have a "wedding blog", you'll notice most of my posts do NOT go into details because um, I'm lazy and we don't HAVE many little details (there are 3-4 small details and that's IT).
However, I just wanted to point out that while we are having a pretty fancy wedding, it's not really FOR us. It's more for our families. They wanted it, are paying for a lot of it, so we are happily planning an expensive wedding. If it had been up to us alone, we wouldn't be having this wedding--we would have gone to Hawaii and had a super small wedding. I also have what many people consider a "large engagement ring" that my fiance could afford and was proud to give me. We hold a lot of sentimental value in my "big" diamond, just like people who have smaller rings. I wanted a specific size ring, we could afford it with no problem, so why not? It doesn't make us superficial or value marriage any less.
Just be careful not to overgeneralize things too much :) Everyone has different situations, and you can't always view what's going on from the outside :)
P.S. I don't blog about "marriage" and the transition into a "wife" because those are things my fiance and I choose to keep between us, not us and the blog world.
I think the point I get from this post is that the wedding is just an event but marriage is not. I do hope that young couples will not only prepare themselves for the wedding but for the long term day in and day out of marriage.
And thanks for the shout out!!
every little kiss...i definitely made the disclaimer that every bride has the right to do what they like. I was merely blogging what was in my heart!
I think the point I get from this post is that the wedding is just an event but marriage is not. I do hope that young couples will not only prepare themselves for the wedding but for the long term day in and day out of marriage. And thanks for the shout out!!
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