Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

Whimsical weddings
Should one’s wedding be picture perfect?
By Ishani Ranasinghe and Renu Warnasuriya
It all starts when a little girl poses in front of a mirror with a white bed sheet hanging from the back of her head. This makeshift veil is the first sign of endless preparation for what may be the biggest day of her life, her wedding.

This age-old obsession with the picture perfect wedding is such that it drives people to all extremes to achieve it. The bride, for instance, must be beautiful. She has to be proposed to five months before the wedding at the very least, giving her enough time for diets and the required number of facials. Then there is the task of picking the designer who would create the most exquisite wedding outfit, filling up a bride’s pre-wedding months with endless fit-ons. While all this is going on, the rest of the family concentrates on the other details, the flowers, the table décor, the food, the location, the photographs, the cake boxes… the list never ends.

When it comes to choosing the bride’s entourage, there is a strict criterion to follow. The bridesmaid, for instance, must not be taller than the bride and should preferably be not as good looking. The pageboys and flower girls must be the cutest things alive, even if they are strangers to the couple. Some people go so far as to overlook their closest relations or best friends when selecting the group and go for the people who would look the best in photographs. (Sometimes the pictures are of the bride and groom hours before their wedding even began in a bid to capture them before exhaustion sets in.)

What is supposed to be a ceremony for two people to unite as one becomes a social gathering full of overdressed people. It’s just that people have taken things to the extent that the ‘event’ becomes more important than the ‘essence’. This does not mean that tradition should be done away with. Overdoing something is where we go wrong. Trim the frills and you could end up with a truly meaningful ceremony, with the focus on the important things. Or dare to be different, but don’t lose sight of what’s important…

Comfortable
“We didn’t want a traditional wedding because it didn’t reflect who we are,” says newly married Natalie, who had a ‘denim and daisies’ theme wedding. She and her husband Paul decided on denim because they felt it was the thing they felt most comfortable in. “Denim is like our second skin, it’s what we are most comfortable in and that’s how we feel with each other,” she explains. The customary rose was replaced by a daisy because the couple saw it as something that had ‘everyday beauty’. “That’s how we want our marriage to be, not just beautiful for one day,” says Natalie.

So how far did they take this unusual theme? “Paul wore a denim suit, I wore a casual white dress with daisies in my hair and my bridesmaids wore denim skirts with white tops,” she says adding that the cake (which, by the way, was not rich cake but love cake) was served in little denim pouches and the church was decorated with denim and daises, complete with daisy petals scattered on a denim carpet.

“Our wedding was a celebration of love as well as friendship,” says Natalie who explains that they would not have been able to pull it off without their friends. “They sang in the choir, wrapped the cake, decorated the church…” she smiles.

When it came to picking the group, the couple went for their closest friends and siblings. And most importantly, “It wasn’t a get up early and pamper yourself kind of thing,” says Natalie who took around an hour to get ready. And if you were a guest at the wedding, all you had to do was pull on a pair of jeans!

“I always wanted to get married in a church,” says Natalie. This wedding, however, was like no other church wedding. Among the hymns sung at the service were ‘Come What May’ from Moulin Rouge, ‘Love Changes Everything’ and ‘The Rose’. “‘Come What May’ is almost like a wedding vow for me,” says Natalie.

Natalie and Paul have no regrets about deviating from the traditional wedding. “We did what we thought was right for us,” she says.

Beach party
For Priyanka and Michael Holsinger it was a beach wedding at a friend’s beach house at Kosgoda. “We really like the beach so we wanted to have our wedding there,” says Priyanka describing their twilight wedding ceremony. “The west coast at that time of the day is just beautiful,” she adds dreamily.

Breaking away from the ‘norm’, they opted for the beach because they too wanted to do their own thing, “something that mattered to us and made us happy.” Believing that their wedding was more of a party than a wedding she laughs, “We wanted our wedding to be fun.”

Speaking about what the others thought about the whole thing she said this was not much of an issue as they had invited only their close friends, “and they were thrilled about coming there.”

So what is it about the ‘fuss’ of a wedding that makes people go weak in the knees? Yes, it is romantic and it is what all girls dream of, but is this because people truly believe it is romantic or simply because it is believed to be the ‘done thing’? Many people have actually worked with the traditions to come up with traditional but unique weddings. And then there are those who dare to break away from the ‘conventional’ to bring out something more personal.

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