Hey Baby, I Think I Wanna Marry You

After we put down a deposit with our awesome officiant, Robyn Posson, she sent us a ton of sample ceremonies and told us to get to it! Okay, so she was much nicer than that and told us to contact her if we had any questions or needed her guidance as we put together our ceremony. Did I mention she is super awesome?

In my excitement, I immediately dove into the samples she sent us. There was a ton of info -- and by a ton I'm talking ten Microsoft Word documents that averaged anywhere from 5 to 30 pages. Each document was labeled according to its category. Want to read Opening Prayers? Or Readings? Or maybe Ring Exchanges? It was all there.

Catherine College

Disclaimer: It was all electronic copies, so no trees were killed in the making of this ceremony. 

It felt a little like this though!

The dude was instantly overwhelmed by all of the material so I did the first sweep and pulled out a few pieces in each category that I thought would reflect us (and more importantly that we would both like).

It was absolutely exhausting and took me foreverrrrrr to get through each section. If I can offer any suggestions when writing your ceremony it would be to step back and take a break for a few days, maybe even a week or two if you have the time. After a while a lot of the passages started to sound the same to me so it was really good to work on something else for a little bit (like catching up on episodes of Parks & Recreation) and not focus on the ceremony.

After I had a few samples going I sat down with Mr. Coyote (again this is not something we whipped up overnight) and we narrowed it down even further.

I don't want to give away the whole ceremony up front, but I will share with you how we organized our ceremony... Hopefully it will help any couples out there who are planning on writing their own ceremony!


I. Welcome -- The officiant thanks everyone for joining us and speaks a little bit about the importance of marriage.

II. Opening Prayer -- This one was a bit difficult for us. My fiance did not want any mention of God in our ceremony and fought me a bit on this. But I reminded him of our compromise and we managed to find a prayer that isn't too intense.

III. Intentions --

"Do you?"

"YES!"

"Do you?"

"YES!"

"Good. You're married. Now kiss her!"

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Spaceballs

IV. Reading -- My cousin will be doing our ceremony reading. This was another toughie. There were sooooo many readings to choose from; it was so hard to narrow it down to just ONE reading. From psalms to poems, song lyrics to movie quotes... It really is an endless list.

V. Vows -- After much consideration we've decided not to write our own vows. My fiance gets really nervous in front of people and I procrastinate and would write mine the night before. Neither of us want that kind of pressure on our wedding day. Plus, we both think there is something really special about the traditional vows.

VI. Song -- Most people have a second reading here, but my little bro and amazing MOH D will be singing a song together during our ceremony. There are both insanely talented and we are so happy that they will be singing at our wedding.

VII. Ring Exchange -- Now we just need wedding bands...

VIII. Ritual -- We've decided to go for the wine box ceremony. Don't worry if you haven't heard about it... I'll be detailing it in my next post!

IX. Closing -- Oh hey, we're married!! Kiss. Recess. PARTY!

 

Image via Zazzle

Yay marriage!

So there's our ceremony in a nutshell. I know it looks like a lot when it's broken down like this, but the whole thing will be done in about a half hour. Wham. Bam. Thank you, ma'am. We're married. Love it.

Are you writing your own ceremony? Did you go cross-eyed reading eleventy billion samples like I did? (And no, that's not a real number... Yet.)