Weddingbee Blog

So, you’ve got fifteen pages worth of inspiration for your ceremony and no idea what to do with it? Let me help.

This part of writing the ceremony was very overwhelming, confusing, and difficult for me. I had fifteen pages of random bits and pieces of ceremonies, and no idea how to organize it. This was the second time in this process that I spent a good ten minutes just staring at the computer screen, trying to use my Jedi mind powers to will it to do the work for me.

Unfortunately, my Jedi powers need some work, and the computer just stared back at me.

So, I had to actually do something. I started by taking my ceremony order and typing it out at the top of the document. I bolded all of the different areas and made the text bigger than everything else, so it’d be easy to spot.

Then came the fun part.

I went through each and every piece of ceremony wording that I had found and separated it into categories. For example, the super sweet introduction to the ring exchange went under, you guessed it, Ring Exchange! The heart wrenching paragraph about love and marriage that made me tear up? I put that under marriage address. Annnd so on and so forth until you have organized all fifteen pages into the correct categories.

When I had everything at least semi-organized, I stopped freaking out quite as much as I had been. It started to feel like this was actually something I might be able to handle, and I was ready to go ahead and take on the next part.

I started at the beginning and re-read everything that I had found. Some of it I loved even more than the first time I read it, and some of it made me wonder how many glasses of wine I had drank while I was searching for inspiration. I deleted the bad parts and kept the good. At this point, I didn’t do anything in the way of re-wording things or adding. I just kept what I liked and threw out what I didn’t.

On some sections, it became clear that I had chosen a good amount of inspiration that fit well together, and I began to slowly see an actual ceremony forming. It was such a great feeling to actually see a real ceremony coming together as I was doing this, and it made all the crazy overwhelming parts totally worth it.

I’m sure you can guess what I did next. That’s right, I closed the laptop and walked away. I’m taking my time on this thing! But first, I sent off a quick email to BIL Cardy (and Sister Cardy) with the very, very rough draft of the ceremony. I wanted BIL Cardy to chime in on anything that he loved (or anything he hated!) and give me some ideas on what he might like to add. And I sent it to Sister Cardy because I’m really just incapable of making decisions without her input, so I wanted her advice!

And as far as our ceremony goes, that’s where we are right now! I have rough draft number one completed, and I’m giving Sister Cardy and BIL Cardy some time to look over it and give me their thoughts. I’ll be seeing them in a couple of weeks, so hopefully we can find some time to chat about the ceremony and come up with another, slightly more refined, draft of the ceremony!

Did you have any wedding tasks that you had to force yourself to take your time on, even though you were really excited about them?