The Biggest Day

I’ve heard my fair share of wedding day horror stories, but this one takes the cake…

I was talking to my best friend last night on Skype – she lives overseas – and she had some goss. A girl we both went to high school with, Jemima, got married on the weekend, and she was a little late to the ceremony. Actually, she was a LOT late. Like, four and a half hours.

That’s not even the worst part… wait until you hear the reason why she was late.

Her wedding dress wasn’t ready. Why? Because the dressmaker – HER MOTHER – hadn’t completed it yet.

It sounds like something out of a movie, but it was a real live nightmare. The ceremony was meant to take place at 3pm, with the reception kicking off from 6pm. Instead, the wedding happened at 7.30pm, and the reception began at 8.30pm.

She’s incredibly lucky that a) the venue and caterers didn’t have conflicting bookings scheduled later that evening, and b) that her guests stuck around.

Another mutual friend of ours was one of the bridesmaids, and she gave my friend the scoop. Apparently, the morning of the wedding Jemima’s mum delivered the dress and said it needed a few minor adjustments. In reality, it wasn’t even complete enough to try on – the skirt was in separate pieces and the bust wasn’t finished.

The bridal team then began to panic, as the bride’s mum promptly announced that the bridesmaid’s dresses were not complete either – and they weren’t likely to be finished any time soon. Sorry!

The three bridesmaids quickly high-tailed it to a local department store and bought three blue dresses – all different designs and slightly different shades of blue, but a close match, considering the circumstances – at a cost of $800 between them. They couldn’t find a suitable blue dress for the flower girl, so she was ditched from the bridal party.

By 3.30pm, half an hour past the scheduled time to walk down the aisle, the dress was still in pieces, the bride was crying, and the groom was anxiously pacing the church. Our friend – who, as a side note, had never met the groom before – was sent on a mercy dash to inform him that the wedding was still going ahead, but that a wardrobe malfunction was holding up proceedings.

At this point, I’m lost. I don’t understand why Jemima’s mum didn’t stay up the entire evening before the wedding to sew the dress together. I don’t understand why she kept working on delicate beading the morning of the wedding, when she should have been sewing the damn dress together. I don’t understand how the bride didn’t insist that the dress be completed at least by the day before, if not the week before, the wedding! And I still don’t understand how they ended up being more than four hours late down the aisle?! By midday wouldn’t you call time of death, and race to the shops for an emergency replacement?

I did a little Facebook stalking to find out exactly what this infamous dress looks like. In the interest of preserving anonymity, I’ve cropped the pics very closely. But this gives you an indication of the dresses – it doesn’t seem too complex.

Anyway, as our friend describes it, Jemima’s mother was frantically sewing, and then the groom suddenly lost the plot. He was phoning Jemima every five minutes, sobbing big crocodile tears and asking why she was stalling the wedding. Jemima, incredibly, was the picture of calm, reassuring her fiancé on every phone call that she was really mere minutes away…

By 7.30pm, they were finally ready to go. The dress wasn’t perfect, but it was stitched together well enough for her to wear it for the evening.

From that point on, event was problem-free. I mean, when the bride is close to five hours late, nothing else really rates a mention does it? “The chicken was a little a dry” or “They forgot to dress the cake table” pales in comparison to “I got stuck talking to ancient aunt Mavis for hours while we loitered around the church…”

Somehow, the dress mishap didn’t ruin Jemima’s big day. The delayed start-time gave guests a chance to mingle, she says, which was a nice silver lining, considering many of them had flown in from overseas. Hmm. She’d better be working on one hell of a thank you card…

84 glasses of wine on the wall – posted February 9

Everyone has a different take when it comes to wedding gifts. Some people think that gift registries are tacky, and other people think that asking for money is classless. I don’t think you can possibly please everyone.

We have registered at a department store for our wedding, mainly due to the experience we had at our engagement party. We told everyone: no gifts necessary. We’d been living together for years and really didn’t need anything, so we asked for donations for the Humane Society in lieu of any presents. However our guests still turned up with gifts – loads of them.

We ended up with (no word of a lie) 84 wine glasses, 24 champagne flutes and eight new platters. No-one needs that many wine glasses!!

To be honest, the main reason we wanted a registry was for interstate and distant relatives – you know, those people that you have to invite because they’re family, but that you’ve only ever seen four times in your entire life, at other people’s weddings. They have no idea what your tastes are or what you would like, so they invariably gift you something that suits their tastes… I had visions of another 84 wine glasses.

So for our wedding, we registered for some things that we need –pots and pans, quality sheets and fluffy towels – and a handful of things that we would like, including a coffee machine and a duck-feather bed spread. We included a range of price points, from $10 to $200, and we thought there was no possible way we would piss anyone off.

We were wrong.

A friend of the family, Noni, was offended when she received our gift registry note in with the invitation. Like, really annoyed. She called my parents and screeched, “What is this all about? I’ve never heard of anything like this before!”

A few minutes of venting later, my mother realised precisely why Noni was so mad. Noni had never heard of a gift registry before. She had received our gift registry card with our unique number printed on it, and she thought that the number related to the exact present that we wanted her to buy.

She thought we had selected, for example, the $90 sheets for Noni to buy, and the $80 skillet for uncle Richard to buy, and the $180 coffee machine for Donna and Jim to buy, etc… So, she thought she would turn up to the store, be directed towards one specific product, and that would have to be her gift to us.

She must have thought we were so rude! Can you imagine actually doing that?! I’m sure it has been done before. However, my mother quickly set her straight.

I guess it proves my point that no matter what you do, someone is likely to take issue with it. My Croatian friend, Tanja, believes that gift registries are just plain tacky, no matter what your reasoning behind it. In her culture, it is much more acceptable to ask for cash. I think asking for cash is inappropriate, on the other hand, because it almost seems like you’re asking for them to pay a price per head to ahead your wedding! Conversely, I have no problem with people asking for gift vouchers, so figure that one out…

At the end of the day it really doesn’t bother me, as I know that no-one ever intends to offend you with their wedding invitation! There was one note I once received that I thought was a bit much. Two years ago, I was invited to a work colleague’s wedding. We weren’t particularly close, but friendly enough. On the back of the wedding invitation was printed the following – I RSVP’d no:

We’ve been living together for several years
and have already built our home.
In lieu of a gift, we would appreciate a cash donation towards our honeymoon!
Please deposit money
into the following bank account:
xxxx xxxx
Don’t forget to include your name
as the reference on the deposit slip.

Pity invites – posted February 9

The wedding guest list! Oh my goodness… I never thought that compiling a simple list of those you wish to celebrate with could cause so many headaches.

My fiancé and I are having a decent sized wedding, with around 120 guests joining us. We’ve actually already compiled our guest list and sent out the invitations – but it turns out that that was only half of the ordeal.

Both his family and my family want to invite certain relatives and family friends, and we’re okay with that. We know that it’s part of the deal at your wedding – you know, celebrating your special day with people you’ve never met! No, I mean, letting your parents celebrate with people that they care about.

As my mother in law has repeatedly told us these last few months, “This wedding is not only about you two, you know…”

So the RSVPs have started flowing in, and there have been some surprises – some people who we thought would absolutely attend are not able to make it, and others that we thought would never make the effort have RSVP’d yes.

The problem we have is, most of the ‘No’ responses have been coming from my groom’s side – and his folks are feeling decidedly under-represented as a result.

We initially invited 150 people, expecting 120 to come. Of those 150 invitations, roughly a third were to my family’s side, a third were to my fiancés family’s side, and a third were to our friends.

Of those guests that can’t make it, the majority are from my fiancés side.

So, we are in ‘pity invitation no mans land’.

To boost his numbers, we have invited his parents’ second-tier list: second cousins, great uncles, and overseas friends.

None of them can make it.

We moved on to the third-tier list: ex-work colleagues, friends they haven’t seen in a dozen years, and children of old friends.

None of them can make it.

Now, we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. We have physically run out of invitations – the paperwork I’m sending out now is from a pre-printed pad of wedding invitations I bought at a craft store. We only printed 160 original wedding invitations, so we were out of stock at the “second cousins” list.

I have finally put my foot down following my mother in law’s latest request: she would like to invite the friend of my fiancés’ sisters’ husband, and his wife. We’ve never met them.

As I scrawled ‘Warren and Tiffany-Lee’ in my neatest writing, I remarked, through gritted teeth, “This is the last one, we’re actually out of invitations now, so we’ll leave it at this…”

“Okay, well, we’ll see, dear,” she responded vaguely.

Thankfully – or not, I’m not sure yet – Warren and Tiffany-Lee promptly RSVP’d, and what do you know? They can make it. I have the sneaking suspicion that they knew they were coming to our wedding before they were even invited.

My mother in law is delighted. I’m exhausted. And we’re not even up to table settings yet…