Weddingbee Blog

Hey!! Today is LOVING DAY!!!! Do you know what Loving Day is? Loving Day is the day we celebrate the legalization of interracial marriage! And what better day to share our programs with you, I ask?!

Now, some of you are probably thinking, “what do wedding programs have to do with interracial marriage?” Well, let me tell you:

First, we are interracial (we’re getting the most obvious one out of the way first, clearly). Second, our program is all about being interracial (or rather, intercultural) because that’s what our wedding is all about. And third, we actually mention this at the end of our programs.

Before I begin, I must say that I have never paid attention to or even noticed programs at weddings, but I never doubted that we would have them. Half of our guests are Chinese and won’t understand the Jewish ceremony, and the other half of the guests will be Jewish and not understand the Chinese parts. We also have our friends, some of whom aren’t Jewish OR Chinese and won’t understand any of it. Thus, the programs.

First the pictures, then some words, shall we?

This here is my sewing machine, all ready to sew some programs. Unfortunately something went awry in the machine and I have to take it in for servicing before I can complete the pink stack and the blue stack…but the green ones are all done, which means I’m 1/3 of the way through. Why three colors? Because everything is colorful at this wedding, and we couldn’t choose just one color for the programs. They’re all the same inside, though.

Here is the design of the program:

I’m quite satisfied with it, but MAN were these a pain in the neck. Believe it or not, the programs were a bigger pain in the butt than the invitations. First off, there was a LOT of printing to be done. These are slightly smaller than half of a regular sheet of paper. Two pages could be printed on one sheet–and there are 13 pages in each program. Plus the front and back covers and the little tag thing. That is a LOT of paper to sew through. It is also a lot of printing and cutting. But mostly it is a lot of ARRANGING. Arranging things in the correct order was a crappy job. Mr. CP and I did it while watching a really, really bad movie. The whole experience was incredibly painful, I’m not going to lie. But it’s over, so we’ll move on.

Here’s an inside page:

Now, for content.

On Page 1, we have our wedding day timeline.

Page 2 is kind of a welcoming. It explains how we met and thanks everyone for being with us.

Page 3 explains the meaning of our ceremony site and the meaning of “our” song–My First, My Last, My Everything, by Barry White.

Page 4 explains the order of the ceremony and reminds people that there will be a group photo in the ampitheater after the ceremony.

Page 5 explains how much our cultures matter to us.

Page 6 summarizes the Chinese traditions.

Page 7 & 8 explain the Jewish traditions (there are more Jewish traditions than Chinese traditions because we’re having a Jewish ceremony).

Page 9 thanks our parents.

Page 10 thanks our officiant and explains how we know her and why she is special to us.

Page 11 is for the bridesmaids.

Page 12 is for the groomsmen.

Page 13 is our “Last but not least” page, in which we honor the memory of our family members who have passed away, thank my aunt and my mom for creating the chuppah, thank my uncle for reading the Seven Blessings, and thank our fuzzy children. At the bottom of this page, we also write:

“Less than fifty years ago, our inter-racial marriage would be illegal. Today we are not only proud to be marrying one another, but we are proud to be Californians, now that gay marriage is finally legal.”

Without fail, that last part makes me cry every single time.

Okay, so I know this all seems needlessly thorough, but trust me, it’s actually really perfect. Mr. Cream Puff gets bored easily by these things, and even HE said it was great and interesting. Which I took as the highest compliment, of course.

At a later date, I will be going through all of the cultural aspects of our ceremony in separate posts. If you guys would like to see the actual wording of any of these other pages, let me know! I would be happy to share them with you, but I didn’t want to make an ultra-long post.

To end this, how about a little bit of trivia? In 1948, exactly 60 years ago, interracial marriage was legalized in California. But it wasn’t until1967 that interracial marriage became legal in the United States. The history behind the fight for interracial marriage is very similar to the fight for gay marriage. Unbelievably, very similar reasoning was given for the “immorality” of interracial marriage, and a constitutional amendment was proposed to prohibit it (unfortunately in the case of gay marriage, the amendments passed in many states). I find it absolutely fascinating that it’s been only 41 years since the Loving decision, yet history is already repeating itself. Hopefully in another 41 years (hopefully less), it will be just as strange a thought that gay marriage was once illegal. Here’s to Loving Day! And here’s to really long programs!