I Accepted His Proposal

Last week I celebrated my 15th wedding anniversary. We didn’t do anything fancy…just went out for the best sushi in our little town with my visiting in-laws.

Wow, 15 years…where did the time go?

In 1999, my now husband asked me to marry him in the hallway of my Mom’s house. At that time, we had been together for two years, and had been “living in sin”, much to my family’s chagrin. A ring was music to my mother’s ears!

After I accepted his proposal, the countdown to the wedding began. Anxiety and excitement set in, and plans began for my party of the century to take place in Fall 2000.

Weddings…the whole concept is so not what I am.

I was not one of those girls who dreamt of their wedding when they were a little girl. No, in fact, I shunned the idea, as I didn’t see myself as ever getting married… but, haw-haw! Here I was, a fool for love, planning a wedding. Looking at my photo albums, the wedding seems so far away, yet like yesterday. At the same time, my memory of the day is as vivid as yesterday.

I committed a whole year to the task of planning my wedding, and like a good student, I was organized, studious and thorough. I still have the binder I used full of all the work I did for the day, and it’s quite something. It brings back a ton of memories, and reminds me of how styles and technology have shifted.

I chose Fall for the time of year…Ever been to a wedding in July? Sweatin’ to the oldies…and you expect me to wear nylons? No thanks! Autumn is such a pretty season, with the leaves changing colour, and the perfect palette to draw from for a wedding. I chose red as a main colour – cheery and different – and orange and yellow also played a role.

I got married in Sudbury, Ontario – 3.5 hours away from where we were living at the time. The nuptuals took place in the church my grandmother had a hand in creating, and where I spent every Sunday from ages 3 to 18. The reception took place in the same hall the hubs’ parents had their wedding reception. The reason for location was because both our families and many of our guests live in Sudbury.

We had 112 guests come to our wedding. Planning a wedding teaches you compromise, and this number was big enough to be called a large event, but small enough not to be overwhelming.

I don’t like dresses, nylons and high-heels. I don’t wear much make-up and don’t like to make a fuss about myself. In any case, I found it surprisingly easy choosing a style of wedding dress. Finding the actual dress wasn’t so simple.  In the end, I had my dress handmade because I couldn’t find anything that didn’t make my sensitive skin break out in a rash.

I wore a bodice under my dress since there wasn’t anything inside the dress to “hold the bewbs in.” I never wore anything like that before…Now, I KNOW I’ve become a woman when I step foot into a lingerie shop and pay $85 for a friggin’ corset…and the bastard was so uncomfortable. At one point I was in tears when I had to wear it to a fitting and one of the bonings (heh) poked me in the ribs so bad, I could barely sit in the car.

Never mind, shoe-shopping on any given day is torturous. I’d live in my sandals all year round if I could! It took me 6 months to find white shoes that didn’t pinch my feet. My original idea was to wear white running shoes decorated with lace like Annie Banks wore in Father of the Bride, but my mother disapproved of this in a big way, and she won that battle (and in hindsight was probably right, I say pouting…).

One of the funnest part of planning my wedding had to have been designing my own wedding invitations. Man, that was great! It precipitated us getting a new computer (an HP Pavillion with Win 98 and a Pentium processor!) and a new flatbed scanner! Having been a Visual Arts grad with some web and Graphic Design experience, I was in my element creating my invitations with PrintShop Pro (the latest Photoshop knock off only Costco could offer!). I saved a lot of money as I used card stock and envelopes available at Staples which kept costs way down. I’m still proud of the workmanship!

It was the year 2000, and unlike today where people have wedding pics taken digitally, outdoors, I had mine taken in a stuffy studio taken on real film (I’ll spare you the Daguerreotypes…). I don’t even have the negatives to my own wedding pics!

Since music keeps us alive, it of course played an integral part in the wedding day. To start, we had fun creating CDs for our wedding party. Having had about 20 people involved in the day, Kevin and I got creative by making our own mixes for our pals. I then got to work creating the best CD cover ever – mimicking the styling of movie posters.

 

I even controlled the music that would play at the reception. I was so anal about what music was to be played – and what music wasn’t – I had a list I handed off to the DJ. The moratorium list was largely ignored (what are you gonna do when a request from a guest for new country music comes in?), and so I got to hear at least 4 Shania Twain songs that night. Still, we managed to cut a serious rug, and do the white man’s overbite on repeat.

Our first song was Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better” (we were on a James Bond kick). The last song was Etta James’ “At Last”, which today is totally ubiquitous with weddings, but back then was largely ignored…I guess I started a trend!

Reminiscing about the day, perusing my wedding planner, looking over the old photo albums, brings back memories. I was nervous and felt awkward the whole time I was at my wedding, which is me on any normal day. But at the same time, I was so elated to be marrying Kevin, I didn’t even feel my awful corset poking me in the ribs.

Overall, it was a wonderful wedding, and the universe willing, I will never have to do that again! Here’s to another 15 years!