Today, while visiting with the Sewing Ladies during their weekly meeting, the talk turned to my wedding. It usually does. The four or five ladies in attendance always love hearing about my wedding plans. They also love getting the church ready for the big day too.
That’s one of the side benefits of marrying at a church that I’m very active in. The old ladies are busy cleaning the nooks and crannies, washing the linens, and even scrubbing the wooden baptism fount with wood cleaner. And did I mention that all of these ladies are in their 80s? It’s incredible to see how excited they are about my wedding day. They really want the church to shine for us. It’s really quite touching.
Our church does offer the option for non-members and people not part of our community to get hitched there. I don’t recommend it though. Our church is lovely 1920s Neo-gothic structure and is a lovely visual for any wedding. But the value of our church and what is really beautiful is the people in it and our community. And when you are a part of the community, you really are family. Every space is dusted, every cranny is wiped down, and the brass is polished till it shines. Trinity is gonna sparkle come April 10th. I can’t wait.
It’s not good for man to be alone. That’s why we have chatroulette and friends. But I’m not hear to talk about chatroulette. I’m here to talk about friends – specifically friends of friends.
As you know, my fiancee and I are planning to have a light dessert reception after our ceremony. It’s been difficult for us to plan that part of the wedding. Most of the caterers we know don’t do just desserts and we felt we’d have to self-cater to get the food we really wanted. But how would we handle the reception ourselves? How do we hire staffers? Where do we even find those? And how to we store the food? We had a million questions and it was stressing us out. The fact that it’s only a little more than a month till the wedding wasn’t helping anything.
Luckily, we have friends. In fact, we have really good friends. A friend of ours sent us a message about an actress she knows who caters desserts. We sent her an email and waited for her to respond. She did and sent back the following menu :
Mini cupcakes (to contrast with the vanilla sheetcakes; choose 1)
- Devil’s food w/Italian buttercream
- Red velvet with cream cheese frosting
Cookies
- Rainbow (aka tri-color)
- Mini chocolate chip
- Vanilla spritz
- White chocolate oatmeal
- Cherry almond biscotti
Brownie Bites
Cinnamon vanilla blondies w/white chocolate and almond
I’m man enough to admit that I drooled when I read that. I got excited. My fiancee got excited. And we even got excited about the price. We scheduled a tasting with the caterer and she came over on Thursday.
These pictures were taken after I started to pig out. We realized that we wanted photographic evidence of the deliciousness that we consumed.
The desserts were great. The cookies were crispy on the outside, chewy in the middle. The scones were perfect scones – great texture and the lingenberry and buttercream topping was an awesome addition to them. The blondie bites were yummy and I could eat those mini-chocolate cupcakes with buttercream frosting all day long. In fact, if the caterer had brought more, I would have eaten them all day long (and my stomach would have hated me). We booked our caterer and, with staff, it came out to $11 a person. You can’t beat that.
I mentioned yesterday that my fiancee and I had figured out the bulk of the background music for our reception. Part of my reasoning for reception music is that it should be appropriate for a wedding day. But appropriate is a funny word. It’s a word that is filled with traditions, cultural taboos, taste, and style. What’s appropriate for one person will be considered obscene by another. The trick is, really, to offend the minimal amount of people possible while, at the same time, not being afraid to play music that you find enjoyable and that sets the corresponding mood. My fiancee and I agreed that nothing sets the right mood at our dessert reception in a traditional gothic Lutheran church’s basement than an old thyme band that sings songs about the Hindenburg Disaster.
The Hindenburg Disaster (Live)
I, of course, am talking about The Two Man Gentleman Band. Banjos, standup basses, and kazoos and songs about the War of Northern Aggression are perfect for our big day. The music is bouncy, fun, and top-taping. It’s the perfect accompaniment to massive amounts of mini-cupcakes and Cost Co cake. The only trick will be to play it at the right volume so that everyone can hear the music lightly but it won’t over power anyone’s conversations. If only Trinity’s basement had a more up to date sound system. Ah well.
My bride and I are busy trying to figure out the playlist for our big day and it hasn’t been easy. Part of the problem has to do with our limited collection and part of it probably has to do with our different tastes in music. It’s less than five weeks till the big day and we have no idea what song will be our first dance. The few songs we’ve bounded over in our relationship were by Atom and His Package, the Lemonheads, William Finn, and from the Broadway show Hot Feet. Sadly the little musical bonding that we’ve had seemed to ignore most wedding appropriate songs (Our mutual love for Lady Gaga and Britney Spears exclude this generalization of course).
We made good progress on what the background music for our wedding reception will be and I’ll make a post about that later. However, an idea recently popped into my head that I would probably do if I wasn’t actually getting married in a church that had a good organ.
I’ve seen several weddings where the guy walks into the venue, red carpet, aisle way, what-have-you, with the song “Here Comes Your Man” by the Pixies playing in the background. It’s a good choice, fits several couples, and I have a blog post in my archives where I feel that the song choice is waaaaay overdone and too cliche. I still stand by that judgement. But, like my fiancee said when we recently talked to our officiate about our wedding program, it’s okay to be cliche sometimes because when you try to be different, 9 out of 10 times, you will crash and burn. Cliche works.
So, if I was going to be cliche and was going to enter our wedding venue with a song playing in the background, the song I would pick is below. I remember when this song came out and I loved it even though I was just a little punk at the time. There’s something about this song that always stokes my ego. There must be a bunch of weddings who used this song at some point and if you know of any, please share.
