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Planning Updates Wedding Packages

Where’s the Party?

Understanding the role of a wedding party in your wedding.

I don’t know when or where I first learned the term wedding party. It may have been when I was in a friend’s wedding while stationed in Korea. Anyway, it was long before I started celebrating weddings.

So it took me by surprise when most of my couples don’t know or understand the term. Most folks come to me thinking “wedding party – that’s the same as the reception, right?”

Well, that is the reception, the celebration after the ceremony. Not quite the same, though the Wedding Party is important to the reception, as we’ll see.

Who is the Wedding Party

The Wedding Party is the core group of the ceremony. Besides the couple, it includes parents and other VIPs, adult and youth attendants, the officiant, and anyone designated to help the officiant perform their duty during the ceremony. All of that makes it sound big and important, doesn’t it?

women wearing pink dresses and men wearing black suit jacket and pants raising hands with red heart balloons

It is important, though it doesn’t have to be big. And I’m going to break down the roles so you can decide who gets to play!

Important People

During the ceremony, there are important people in the first row. This is most often the parents and close family of the couple. It can also be anyone who’s help and mentorship are significant in your lives.

Many couples invite VIPs to walk down the aisle during the Processional. Sometimes Dad escorts Daughter, and sometimes all the parents walk. These days, this is a very individual decision. As you might imagine, other people in the row include grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings.

Attendants

Traditionally, these are the bridesmaids and groomsmen. I’ll go over historical roles in a moment. Before I do, I’ll mention that children and some animals can be attendants, too. Basically, an attendant is anyone who comes up to the altar during the ceremony.

Historically, the noble or well-to-do couples had attendants in daily life, and these same folks served the roles in marriage. The groomsmen (Groom’s men) was an honor guard of retainers that ensured the security of the chapel. If you look at historically inspired weddings out of Europe, or are a fan of Historical Romance, this is probably a familiar image.

Stockbridge Farm Wedding, Sherbourne, UK, Louise Adby Photography

Similarly, the bridesmaids (Bride’s Maids) were the bride’s ladies-in-waiting. These personal attendants, among other things, ensured the honor of the bride by acting as chaperone.

These attendants stood with the bride and groom during the ceremony, representative of their honorable duty. But what about now?

Choose your attendants from close, responsible friends. You no longer need to pay attention to gender tags, of course. We may refer to them by traditional titles or they can be Bridesmen, Groomsperson, or simply, Attendant.

Beyond the ceremony, this posse of yours forms a core of volunteers for your wedding day. They act as hosts and coordinators during the event, while you are busy with your other wedding day obligations. They’re also a pool of witnesses for the legal paperwork of the wedding.

Two traditional roles are something you should seriously consider when creating a Wedding Party. These are the Best Man and Maid of Honor. These are your Primary Attendants, and have the most to do during the ceremony. And the weight of tradition makes them the leading attendants, acting in your stead. These two are charged with making you look your best in all things.

Best Man

This attendant stands for the groom. In olden days, he was the chief retainer. Similarly, it’s now a friend or relative your trust to watch your back. During the ceremony, this attendant stands by and serves as ring bearer if you haven’t made other arrangements. Afterward, they’re often a witness on the paperwork.

Maid/Matron of Honor

This person stands for the bride. Traditionally, the first lady-in-waiting of the peer, she was responsible for her mistress’s health, hygiene, and dress. In some ways, that still holds true as they’ll help you with the bits of the dress you can’t reach. (Wedding dresses are complicated.) During the ceremony, they arrange and tidy The Dress and take your bouquet. If you have a train, they’ll make sure it’s pointed in the right direction for the Recessional. They, too, are a witness on the wedding.

Non-Traditionally Speaking

Don’t get too wrapped up by my use of traditional language. I’ve worked with Best Women, Men of Honor, and other appropriate titles. If you or they are non-binary, or have other reason to ditch patriarchal language, it is no big deal to simply refer to them as Jewel and Martha’s First Attendants.

Other Adult Attendants

It’s normal to have several attendants on each side. I usually recommend that the number of attendants not exceed 20% of the expected audience for esthetic reasons. It looks and feels awkward to have the Wedding Party outnumber the audience. Another part of that has to do with “additional duties as assigned”.

Besides serving as backup witnesses, you can put these folks to work. They can help with all aspects of planning, loading in, and making your day. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, they help keep the reception going and ensure everyone has a great time celebrating your wedding.

Youth Attendants

You can involve minors in your wedding, and there are a number of ways to do that. It depends on their age, maturity, and willingness to be in front of an audience.

Older children, from around 10, can participate as attendants the way adults do. You and they need to realize that there is a lot of standing around before, during, and immediately after the ceremony so that plays into the decision. My longest ceremonies have averaged around 20 minutes or so, which is a long time for a pre-teen.

a cute flower girls walking together with the bride and groom
Photo by Taha Samet Arslan on Pexels.com

More typically, youths participate as ring bearers or flower children. My recommendation is to have them take their seats in the audience after performing their duties. That let’s them take part in the celebration without putting them under a spotlight for too long.

Cats and Dogs…

As I mention in my previous post, I’ve had couples bring their animals into the ceremony. In the rehearsal and ceremony there are actions you should take to ensure your animal friend’s success.

  • Always have a handler. Designate someone to be with the animal 100% of the time. Out of about two-dozen canine ring bearers only 1 behaved perfectly off-lead. That left more than a dozen that ventured into the audience or ran away. The remainder followed my advice.
  • Have a plan. We usually have the dog walked in with a ring pouch. After they deliver the rings, they’re taken behind the audience. This does two things:
    • Minimizes the input for the dog. This is terribly important for our sensitive friends.
    • Minimizes the distraction for the audience. If doggo stays out front, that’s where Auntie Lisa’s eyes will be. Let’s keep the focus appropriately on you.
  • Have a backup plan. If you decide Fido can handle the crowd, definitely have a backup plan. Give the rings to the officiant, or keep them in your pocket. Fido may prove you are right, and I’ll cheer with you. But if he takes off with the rings, we must stop everything to collect him.

I haven’t had horses, goats, or birds in any of my weddings yet. Those happened after the ceremony. I had a couple who wanted their cats to be ring bearers at a public park. Fortunately, they thought better of it once they arrived with the kitties in their bubble.

The Officiant and Their Helpers

I mention the helpers because that was part of the high-church tradition. Usually, they provided deacons and ushers to help with the congregation, and within the ceremony with various ritual elements.

Although I’ve yet to take part, some couples with diverse spiritual or ethnic backgrounds may hire two celebrants to come up with an appropriate and culturally sensitive ceremony. For example, I’m familiar Jewish wedding traditions, but I would want to involve a cantor or rabbi in designing those parts of the ceremony.

I put up one post about hiring a professional celebrant. As you can imagine, it’s a topic dear to me. I’ll likely put up another post in future. The key thing with hiring a professional is you get access to their training and experience. Cousin Tommy may have gotten himself ordained online, but how many weddings has he done?

“But we want Bill to do it because he knows us.” That’s been a common refrain, and it overlooks the relationship you will build with your celebrant. By the wedding day, they will know you too.

Knowing is Half the Battle

So, now you know about wedding parties. You know a bit of the history and tradition that bring us to today. I given you my thoughts and experience. May you find inspiration!

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Coronavirus Reverend's Notes

Get Ready for 2021

Part 1 – Get Ready

A Back Forty Elopement with Reverend Jim Beidle

It seems redundant to say that 2020 brought a lot of opportunities and threats. I mean, everyone who has lived through the past year knows about the changes a modern response to the global pandemic has wrought. Globally, societally, and individually we have each learned how to manage our lives differently. Here’s the first of three posts discussing the changes coming to Weddings with Reverend Jim Beidle in 2021. Part 1 is the ‘Get Ready’ of ‘Ready, Set, Go!’

Gathering Perspective

Adapting to this new lifestyle has been no different for Weddings with Reverend Jim Beidle. Learning to serve my couples during the past year has changed the substance of my business. Coming up with ways to provide services virtually. Providing comfort and support to the couples living with upended plans. Venturing into new methods and markets for elopements and micro-weddings has fueled my personal and professional growth.

Santa Prepares Paperwork
Santa readies the marriage certificate for Brandon and Mia.

Many of you know that I put my time and talent to use portraying Santa Claus during November and December, a traditionally slow wedding season. Again, all the early predictions for how the season would progress painted a dismal picture. Indeed, news reports from the season, like this one, demonstrate why intimate, knee-top visits with St. Nicholas are a terrible idea. The retail visit, a holiday standard since the Baby Boom, ended up with many elders, adults, children ill, in the hospital, or dying. It called for a new approach.

virtual visit.
Santa Jim Peers over his glasses during a virtual visit.

For the 2020 holiday season, I provided hundreds of virtual visits with Santa Claus. Varying in length from a few minutes to a half-hour provided a new experience for children and their families. And parents took advantage of the ability to have Santa coach and encourage children. Coupled with performing shows online and providing personalized pre-recorded videos, it gave me a new and refreshing way to engage with people. And that got me thinking about next year.

Pondering the Season

I could easily go on about how wonderful the changed wedding season was for me. In fact, I did a bit of that in this previous post. I also would love to spend time telling stories about the lives Santa touched during the holiday season. For more about that, here’s an interview I did with Nicole Brodeur of the Seattle Times. It’s often easy for me to get lost in the stories, as I sometimes do.

But this post is about the future! By now, watching the news and listening to scientists, we know that our lives have really changed. Looking at previous pandemics, we know that we will get through. And when we eventually get to the other side, how will society have changed? More importantly, how will we have changed? How do we prepare ourselves for the new reality?

Rational Thinking

Two people planning.
This is the sort of organized chaos I make when I strategize.

Here are some of my take-aways as I plan for the next two or three years. Pandemic restrictions are going to be with us for a while. Here’s my reasoning.

  • Our divided national response to the pandemic hasn’t worked. Until we unite behind a rational response to preventing the spread of Coronavirus and its variants, that won’t change.
  • Despite conflicting reports, scientists have been clear from the beginning that they are still learning about how Coronavirus works. The scientific method works, but it is slow and full of blind alleys that each want exploring. Even with the vaccines, we still don’t have all the answers.
  • Even with an accelerated rollout of the new vaccines, we won’t reach a viable amount of immunity before Autumn. Assuming everyone took the vaccine at the right times and in the right doses, that leaves the problems of making and delivering over 600,000,000 doses. I haven’t seen anything that points to production levels that high. And there are still those who won’t or can’t take the vaccine.

Those bullets are rationales; reasons why I expect the restrictions will continue to be necessary. We also must address emotional and egoistic challenges.

How Emotions Play into ‘Get Ready’

And that isn’t a call to judgment. Instead, I baldly recognize how our conscious minds appropriate any internal bias we carry to justify behavior rooted in anxiety.

Mature doctor tired after long day.
Mature doctor tired after long day. We’re all feeling the strain these days, aren’t we?
  • It’s a natural state for humans to have anxiety about change. It’s normal for us to resist change in our environment at a primary and unconscious level. That behavior mostly kept us alive when we lived in forests and on the plains.
  • Our conscious minds don’t always know what to do with that unconscious concern. Sometimes it’s a complete melt-down, ugly crying, rage spew. Especially if that person has been “holding it together” until that one last thing, and we may not even know why we’re falling apart.
  • We’ve seen other ways this natural anxiety takes over the conscious mind in public. People are irrationally refusing to take precautions to protect themselves and others. Despite clear contrary evidence, leaders and influencers have called the restrictions an “attack on liberty,” a hoax, and even some kind of conspiracy. Individuals have gone from shouting matches to pitched battles over the need for more rigorous hygiene in our public places.

The forgoing bullets sound assertive and potentially depressing, don’t they? With these points. I am attempting to affirm how we rationalize the internal conflict and anxiety we naturally feel about an individually uncontrollable situation. The discomfort I feel with those statements or that you feel when reading them reflects how little we control this slow-moving natural disaster.

Changing Our Minds

What do we control, then? We remain in control of how we respond. Choose kindness, educate ourselves, and reach out to others in our ‘bubble’ and our sphere.

We can choose to let go of the thoughts and feelings that urge us to withdraw into an apocalyptic defensive posture. Remember that our country has been through pandemics before and survived. And even thrived in the years following recovery. Make time to notice the beauty surrounding us and get joy from the good that we see others do.

Choose to stay connected with each other and our community in ways that didn’t exist during the Flu Pandemic 100 years ago. We can move away from technology that walls us off from others to using technology to stay in touch. More than just for work, applications like Zoom, Meet, and Facetime make it easy to reach out to friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

How to Get Ready

This short essay could easily turn into a 50,000-word book if I let it. And that might be a project if a couple of dozen people are interested. Instead, I’ve tried to show some of the factors that are part of planning for 2021.

But let’s turn back to pondering the 2021 wedding season, shall we? Before turning to Part 2, tell me in the comments about how you are doing. How are you coping with a New Year that looks a lot like the old year? What are your plans? Or, go here and start a conversation with me.

In Part 2, I’ll share my vision for things to come. We’ll look at what I see as a natural progression for the business of being human in 2021. Part 2 is all about the work that takes us from ‘Get Ready’ to ‘Get Set!’

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