From Wedding Bell Blues to Bliss
When a virus disrupts the wedding plans, you gotta get creative
We wanted “the perfect wedding” for our only daughter. Doesn’t every parent? And until businesses, churches and many homes closed their doors for the Covid quarantine, that’s what we were planning and that’s what we thought she would get. So what if she lives 2500 miles away from us? A couple of trips from our new home in Middle Tennessee to Washington State was all it took to survey wedding venues and sample the caterers. We made those decisions back in January, scheduling the place and time, deciding on the menu, and putting down the required deposits.
Meanwhile our daughter and her fiancé booked a photographer and DJ and made decisions about flowers and their wedding party. Our daughter said yes to the designer dress and sent out invitations to 120 people for a late July shindig. All that was settled by early February.
Then the world stopped.
We watched the best-laid plans of intelligent and well-meaning people grind to a halt. The wedding venue temporarily terminated operations. The dress designer hit pause on its manufacturing. RSVPs suddenly ceased. We watched and waited. Surely this crisis would be over by July, we thought.
As Covid cases continued to skyrocket, we started working on a Plan B. The venue promised a limit on crowd size even after reopening and we began to painfully pare down the guest list, making impossible decisions about whom we might have to ‘un-invite.” We held our breaths, hoping we wouldn’t have to send out those notices.
Finally, a light appeared at the end of the lockdown tunnel. From our home in Tennessee, we waited with bated breath to hear Washington’s reopening plan. When it finally came it was bad news; the schedule didn’t coincide with ours. The state’s proposed timeline affirmed our fear that crowds would be limited well into July; thus, the venue kept in place its rigorous social-distancing rules. It was time for a Plan C, but our creativity was spent.
Fortunately, our daughter and her fiancé are quite gifted in that area. They proposed a radical solution: forget the venue; forget the caterer. Forget the DJ and the wedding dress. Forget Washington. Move the wedding to our home, they suggested; have a small get-together out back with only our immediate families in attendance, and anyone else who wants to watch can view a live Internet feed. Great idea, we thought, and with so few guests, how hard could that be?
We found out.
First of all, our daughter and her fiancé decided to move the wedding date up to the slightly less scorching month of June, giving us a mere month to prepare. Secondly, we had no privacy in our backyard, our new home on the corner of a semi-major thoroughfare bounded by a public walking trail. And who, we asked ourselves, was going to be in charge of the menu, and how were we going to serve it? To what extent would we enforce social-distancing? What about utensil and counter cleanliness? Would we request that everyone wear masks? Even with a tiny group of guests, our house is small enough to mean we’d be breathing a lot of the same air.
My family hurriedly kicked preparations into high gear. Borrowing a few folding chairs, punch bowls and crystal, we prepared for an intimate backyard ceremony. Family members offered to help prepare food and buy beverages. My daughter and wife ordered new and less-formal dresses online. We found a contractor willing to erect a privacy fence just days before the date.
Our daughter’s organizational skills proved exceptional. She assigned duties on an electronic spread sheet with near daily updates. My wife and I took advantage of free Covid-19 testing in our area as did most of the wedding party and many of the guests; the results came back negative. The contented couple walked through the red tape to get a Tennessee marriage license, we prevailed upon a pastor from our church to officiate, and as the date neared, the logistics continued to fall into place. Plan C was working.
But to say it came off without a hitch would be an exaggeration. We completed some components of the wedding in the final moments. Amid the eleventh-hour confusion, a large cooler containing much of the reception food went AWOL in our 90-degree garage for nearly 24 hours. Rather than risk poisoning our wedding guests, a visiting relative volunteered to go buy it all again. Meanwhile the fence builders were still at work, and with some verbal encouragement and anxious looks from the homeowners, they completed their job literally minutes before the wedding rehearsal began. We discovered a myriad of other minor details that had escaped our attention, and those burdens were quickly assigned to members of the wedding party as well as to guests who thought they had come only to witness the event, not participate in it. I think we even delegated a job to the officiant’s wife.
As is true of everything that bears a firm deadline, the wedding happened, ready or not. It didn’t happen perfectly, but it happened joyously and memorably and officially. And when it was over, we knew without a doubt that if we had it to do all over again, we’d do most things exactly the same.
Oh, I almost forgot; we are going to do it all over again. Those deposits we paid to the wedding venue, the caterer and the photographer in Washington State are non-refundable, but they are still valid. That designer wedding gown still at the dressmaker’s is eventually going to adorn our daughter’s frame. She still wants to dance the night away to the music of a rocking DJ, and I’ll admit that I’m looking forward to my daddy-daughter dance. We still want all those 120 guests holding invitations to experience a wonderful evening. So in July of 2021, barring another monstrous pandemic, we’re going to have that “perfect wedding.”
It’s going to be the best one-year anniversary party this family’s ever seen.
© Nick Walker 2020
Anyone else trying to hold or attend a wedding during this season? I’d love for you to scroll down and leave a comment.
