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Being from the South, this post is probably one of the most nerve wracking to write. I was raised a Christian. My parents weren’t strict about church, but I chose to go and ended up accepting Christ as my savior when I was in middle school. As I grew in my faith, I started questioning more and more about religion, and eventually quit going to church. I now find myself more in a Unitarian camp. My fiance, on the other hand, is atheist. So when looking into ceremony wording and readings, it was important to us to have things that aren’t overtly religious but still mean a lot to us. We’ve managed to take a lot of the ceremony from a Buddhist ceremony.
Besides the traditional exchanging of rings, we wanted to have another sort of unity ceremony. We considered three.
The candle ceremony was the first. This was the most familiar to us and therefore at the top of our list. But after talking to Suzy (our fairy godmother), candles are a no-go at our venue because it is outdoors. She said that too many times in the past the candles wouldn’t light or went out, and it just creates an awkward moment that she chooses to avoid by advising brides against it. But this was the only unity ceremony either of us had ever seen in person, and I’ve never been one to shy away from shopping for new candles.
Image via Jared Wilson Photography
One of my latest wedding obsessions is guestbooks modeled after a Quaker marriage certificate and/or a Jewish ketubah. Wedding customs have always interested me and, after learning about these traditions, I have been determined to find a way to incorporate their lovely sentiment and significance into our wedding.
A traditional Quaker marriage certificate* states the date, location of the wedding, and sometimes the vows recited to each other. The certificate is then signed not only by the bride and groom, but also by all the witnesses of the ceremony to show their support for the union.
An example of a more traditional Quaker marriage certificate:
A few weekends ago, Mr. Candy Apple and I went to our Pre-Cana. We are now officially able to get married in the Church! For those of you who don’t know, Pre-Cana is the required marriage-prep course for all couples getting married in the Catholic Church. Some programs are an entire weekend; ours was Saturday from 2PM to 10PM. In all honesty, I kind of wish we had done the full-weekend version!
I actually really enjoyed the program, but Mr. Candy Apple said he didn’t get much out of it. We were separated into small groups (about six couples to a group), and each group included a host couple. Essentially, there were lots of presentations by the host couples—men and women who are married (some for over 35 years) and were volunteering to share their experiences with us. It was really nice to hear from these people and listen to what helps keep their relationships strong. It sort of reminds me of the “After I Do” series! You get to hear about what marriage is really like.
There were also lots of exercises that we did—individually, as couples, and as a group. I liked these because they asked the big questions about marriage and helped get us thinking about how our lives will change when we are married, when we have kids, etc. Fun stuff to think about!
One question that came up was the idea of traditions and practices. What traditions do our families have? What do we want to bring into our new family? A lot of the host families talked about how they integrated their old traditions and practices into their new families, particularly when they started having children, and what new traditions they have started.
Painting by Norman Rockwell / Image via Art Renewal Center
Note: This (long) post is specific to Catholic-NonCatholic interfaith weddings. Actually, it might be specific only to a Catholic-Jewish interfaith wedding, but my hope is that this will be helpful for a Catholic-Anything interfaith wedding as a starting point. It is also based only on my experiences, which does not make me an expert. A while ago I promised to post about my experiences finding a priest and a rabbi to co-officiate, so here goes!
So, you’re marrying outside the Catholic Faith. OR you are not Catholic, but your fiance is, and you’ve decided to go the equal representation of religions route rather than choosing one or nixing religion and using a Justice of the Peace. It may seem impossible at first, but knowledge is power when it comes to finding a Catholic Priest to co-officiate, so lets go over what Mr. Thimble and I needed to do and maybe it can help some of you.
I was really nervous and I’ve never been very active at church. I avoided asking our local parish priest and I hesitated to email a priest I knew from college (a Catholic university). Lucky for me, before I worked up the nerve to contact either of them, my aunt (and Godmother) worked some magic and emailed her cousin, the graduate chaplain at Harvard, who has performed countless interfaith ceremonies and knows exactly what he’s doing. And, he’s super smart and can explain why we have to do what we’re doing and where it comes from. Which is what I need.
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It’s a beautiful guest book! Alright, maybe it’s not quite exciting enough to warrant that title but it’s really effin’ pretty and I had absolutely nothing to do with it. Mom Trail Mix took the reins on this one, working with a local artist to create a one-of-a-kind book that is truly a work of art.
Here’s the cover. It’s a textured paper and the binding was hand-sewn by the artist. She does some kind of swirly paint thing (that’s a technical term, folks) to create this marble-pattern.
Shalom Bayit is Hebrew for peace in the home.
I mentioned previously that I didn’t feel that different after we moved in together because it felt like the natural next step for us. However, we did make it a special experience for both of us (actually, you’ll soon find out, Mr. Hermit Crab made it special for me!).
Shortly before I moved to Syracuse, and in with Mr. Hermit Crab, we visited Israel. My birthday was in the middle of trip, and Mr. Hermit Crab gave me a very special present. He found a framed and painted version of the Birkat HaBayit - Blessing for the Home, and gave it to me to hang in our new home together.
personal photo of my Birkat HaBayit
The translation of the Hebrew text is:
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Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
Or in our case, DIY: Fail.
There were oh-so-many things that we (okay, I) wanted to DIY, and our ketubah was one of them. A ketubah is a Jewish wedding contract; the original Hebrew text actually reads a lot like a prenup, outlining the groom’s responsibility to the bride. In addition to being an important part of a Jewish wedding ceremony, many couples now use it as an art piece that commemorates their wedding day and commitment to one another. There are so many beautiful Ketubahs that you can get nowadays; Mrs Spaniel, Miss Trail Mix and Mrs Hot Cocoa have all written about their experience finding ketubahs.
We spent some time looking at hundreds of ketubahs online, and found so many different ones, from painting to paper cuts.
(source)
However, after looking at so many beautiful and different designs, I decided that I wanted to try and make my own.
Recently, I showed you the wedding planning binder that I put together for myself and several of my friends. Now I am going to share with you a few of the resources that we have used and that I have subsequently shared with my friends as they are on their own planning journeys. The following three books have been invaluable to Mr. Hermit Crab and me as we plan for our wedding and of course, our marriage.
(source)
The New Jewish Wedding by Anita Diamant was the first book that I bought. I also bought it for all the women involved in the wedding planning with me.
(Source)
One of the first things that we had to talk about when after we got engaged was when. Many years ago, and kind of in passing, Mr. Hermit Crab had mentioned that he didn’t want to get married until after medical school. And this was before he even started! We got engaged during his third year of medical school, and after graduation still seemed to be a reasonable time. Graduation was set for mid-May 2010, and residency begins at the end of the June, so we decided to choose something late May or early June, so we would have time to move and take a vacation. The last weekend in May was going to be Memorial Day weekend, so we decided on a Sunday in early June and luckily for us, our venue was available.
Why Sunday?
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Although it’s cold and dreary outside, I need to start brainstorming pretty, summer inspirations for our Chuppah. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, a Chuppah is a canopy that Jewish couples are traditionally married under. It is supposed to represent the new home the couple is creating together. The lack of walls in the structure is meant to symbolize the welcoming of everyone into the home as well as the tradition of Tzedakah, or charity.
My grandmother has already offered to let me use her mother’s (my great-grandmother’s) lace tablecloth for the top of the Chuppah. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out how to work out the details of the structure. It has to be big enough that at least myself, Mr Trail Mix and our rabbi can all stand underneath it.
I know I want to keep it organic-looking and natural. It’s possible we will either stick the poles straight into the ground, but if it rains, then we will have to have the ceremony inside and I can’t really stick poles into a wood floor, so I need to think of an alternative. Oftentimes, the groomsmen or other important guys physically hold the four poles up, but I think I’d rather not do that because… well, you can imagine all the possible scenarios where that could go terribly, terribly wrong.
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Mr. Spaniel seemed to be more surprised every time we talked about the fact that I wanted a Jewish wedding… maybe it took him a few months to pay attention when I talked about it. 
Anyway, he definitely had a WTF moment when we talked about a ketubah (a Jewish marriage contract) a few months back (even though it was at least the third time it’s come up and he was totally okay with it the first two times!), so I decided to do some research into the texts. Certainly we would not be having an orthodox ketubah, because we don’t follow “the laws of Moses and of Israel”, but I like the idea of writing down in a “contract” our expectations of each other and our marriage, and I wouldn’t mind writing our own (in lieu of writing our own vows to be read aloud at the ceremony).
After I saw a beautiful Ketubah (Jewish marriage contract) posted by a reader on the boards, I clicked on the website to see who the artist was. Her name is Amy Kagin and her Ketubahs are works of art. I browsed through a bunch and while I loved them all, I managed to pick out a few that I felt particularly excited about. The first two reflect a more modern style of Judaica but the movement and colors are so pretty!
I’m blogging live from our new house as we finish a long day of painting and house projects. Being here is solidifying the very real move that I am going to make to live with my Lamb Lover after we’re married. I’ll leave my old city and embrace the new.
This reality has reminded me a lot of the words that Ruth spoke in the Old Testament. They are a favorite at weddings. Mrs. Cheese used them, and they’ve been suggested on several wedding websites. They’re beautiful and the bond described is so representative of the marriage relationship.
The words, however, were not about a marriage relationship at all. The short story is that Naomi, her husband, and her two sons moved to a new town to find food during a famine. Naomi’s husband dies and her sons marry two local women, one of them Ruth. Then the sons die. Naomi cannot support herself and tells her daughters-in-law to go back to their families and remarry. One daughter-in-law goes back, but Ruth says to Naomi:
“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”
The story of Ruth, of course, doesn’t end here.
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Remember all those beautiful ketubot I blogged about last month? Well, one thing I’m learning day by day as part of the wedding planning process is that Mr. Petunia and I don’t always agree on what we like. I knew which ketubot I loved, but when I ordered the samples and had Mr. Petunia looked at them too, I quickly learned which ones he didn’t love - sigh. It took a bit of going back and forth and getting some new samples before we finally agreed on this simple and classic one and ordered it:
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