Going To the Chapel…

I found that there was a lot more involved in choosing a reception venue abroad than there was finding a ceremony venue. I suppose that makes sense, seeing asyou’re typically only at the ceremony for a few short hours, whereas so much happens at the reception that you need to plan for. Just like everything else, I found our ceremony location pretty easily online, while sitting at a computer in London.

Mr. Jaguar and I are both baptized Catholics. He is fully practising and goes to church each week—I only recently made the effort to be more consistent. My lovely fiancé has given me free rein on quite a lot of the planning, so most of the preparation talk you’ll hear in my blogs will seem to be all about me, me, me and what I think will work really well on our wedding day. Behind the scenes though, he has actually been pretty vocal about parts of the wedding that are important to him, and one of those parts was the actual marriage ceremony itself.

Mr. Jaguar wanted a traditional Catholic church ceremony.

To be perfectly honest with you, I didn’t mind where or how we got married. Whether we held the ceremony in a church or in a garden or on a rooftop, the outcome is still the same for me: I get to marry my best friend. So while a few of my more dramatic dreams of outdoor gardens and long-winded personal vows may have been dashed, I’m actually more than happy to have gone down the church route—though I’ll admit, I have a lot of learning to do to get up to speed about what it is entails before, during and after the wedding itself.

We’re also lucky that Mr. Jaguar has a cousin who is a Catholic priest back home, so that was one of the first things we organised: could he officiate our service? He was more than happy to oblige us, which was awesome—he’s married a lot of the cousins within Mr. Jaguar’s family, so it’s great that we get to carry on this little family tradition, too. I hope he’ll be patient with me as I do my best to plan for the service.

As for the deciding on the church itself, well, that was a little trickier. I don’t have a local church at home, Mr. Jaguar’s local parish is located in a school auditorium, and Cousin Priest’s home church was miles away from our reception venue possibilities. I spent ages contacting churches locally, trying to find one that was free for non-local parishioners, and one that was small, intimate and ‘us’. I found one in the strangest of places: during some random photographer stalking. This is where I first saw our potential church; scroll down to the fourth or fifth image and there it was.

{Personal photo}

The second I walked into the church for myself, I knew it was the one. I could already imagine walking down the teeny aisle, and I could imagine our family filling the pews and preparing for the ceremony. Our church has a nice old wooden ceiling & beautiful arches with natural light all the way through.