Cliquot + cowboy boots

Written by Alex Tower Ewers

 

I said yes. I said yes to being someone’s wife. But all anyone wants to know is “So when is the wedding?”

 

I did not spend a lifetime dreaming of a perfect wedding: I didn’t even know a solitaire from a princess setting and managed to get my engagement ring sized on the wrong finger! I have helped numerous friends execute their most perfect wedding celebrations and found myself to be a fairly good amateur wedding planner, but when it came time to be my own wedding planner, I wanted to run and hide. I had worked for years with brides and couples, designing their invitations, and I assumed that planning my own wedding would be easy and terribly uncomplicated.

 

But what if you never really thought you needed to get married? What if you hadn’t spent your entire life dreaming of and planning a fantasy wedding? What if you never even imagined yourself as a bride? What is an intelligent, creative, yet non-conformist woman to do, I asked myself standing in front of the Weddings section at Borders? Every book I picked up, every website I found, all addressed the needs and desires of a woman I could not relate to. I wasn’t the bride, just a girl who said yes to her guy’s question, who wanted to have a party with her most favorite family and friends and maybe even say “I do” in red cowboy boots.

 

What was really missing from the many wedding planning books I opened was me. Well, actually what was missing was us.

 

So, the “us” sat down at our regular Sunday breakfast place and just started to talk. Brainstorm, dream, throw out ideas. No idea was too outrageous, too expensive or too unrealistic. And it all started to make sense on a little tiny beverage napkin.

 

When I started to share with Patrick the costs of some of the weddings we had attended, the look of panic and disgust that came over his face is something I won’t easily forget. I assured him that I had no such visions of grandeur or decadence because in all actuality if we were going to spend some money I wanted hardwood floors in our apartment instead of a lavish wedding. But we agreed that it was important to celebrate our union and to be surrounded by our family and friends, so we simply started there.

 

An international destination wedding was not my fiancés vision and during that pivotal conversation one Sunday morning, we began to create our dream experience. He wanted a community celebration, in which our friends and family became participants instead of spectators, much like the vision of a barn raising in the Amish community. We began to design “our barn raising”. With a lot of out of the box thinking, some compromising, a few furrowed brows and a whole lot of help from our community we created a homegrown wedding.

 

Several Northern California retreat centers later, we happened upon Wilbur Hot Springs. Whether it was the long and winding country road one took to get there, the hand painted signs that suggested it was “time to slow down” or the slight odor of sulphur that tickled our noses, I am now not sure what made us unanimously say “Yes, this is it.” This charming and quirky sanctuary in the middle of nowhere would be the place for our quirky and unconventional wedding celebration.

 

No electricity, two outside showers, shared rooms, no cell phone reception and clothing optional hot springs. It was perfect. Besides asking my Catholic mom to expand her dream of my wedding in the church, narrowing down our guest list to 75 people and then figuring out what strangers would be willing to sleep together in the same room, the planning process took on a life of its own.

 

I had helped plan enough weddings and help more brides create the perfect invitations for the perfect weddings, that I knew enough to get organized, get inspired, get a theme and get going. On our extremely small budget and given the restrictions of our location I figured the planning would be easy – but what no one told me is that there is this thing called the wedding wacko syndrome that causes even the most level headed, calm and generally content women to turn into napkin obsessed, perfection seeking zombies. And yes, I at one point turned into one. Not enough time, not enough money, too many choices – the typical triad of reality that gets in the way of any dream, no matter what size or shape.

 

With a load of out of the box thinking, my mother’s wedding dress, a last minute veil and the generous help of many of our talented friends and family, we ended up with a bride in red cowboy boots, Cliquot in our glasses, paper linen napkins because the linen ones never arrived and a groom in khakis because his suit pants never made it out of our apartment in the city. It was in fact a wildly successful and positively lovely homegrown wedding, where everyone helped, everyone was happy and everyone was absolutely necessary in making it happen.

 

When the last thank you card was written and the photos organized and the wedding dress boxed up, I was able to sit back and think about what I learned about myself, my groom, my family, my friends. And I saw an opportunity – an opportunity to transform how we a culture wed. I thought about becoming a wedding planner or writing a book or creating a website for DIY wedding planning, but I realized that my kind of wedding is not your kind of wedding and the point is to find what makes you smile and tick. What is a true and real expression of you, your partner and your relationship? Instead, I came up with my TOP 10 – a list of suggestions for keeping you cool, keeping you calm and keeping you connected, no matter what your dream nuptials might look like.

 

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