Ceremonies

"We can't all believe in Christ, and what does the farmer care about art? He takes his shoes off to get the warm feel of the rich earth between his toes. You can't take your shoes off in church."
   - Nathanael West

If you have, say, a Catholic wedding, you know what you're getting. Church, mass, priest, communion, etc. It's all laid out. But starting from scratch means you can do anything, which is freeing and scary and nerve-wracking and awesome. It's how a recent immigrant feels when faced with an American megamart cereal aisle for the first time. But never fear: I'm here to help (with your wedding, but also breakfast goods if necessary).

Wedding ceremonies are generally include four basic components: Ritual; Readings; Music; Vows. Not all of these are necessary, and all can be handled in wildly variant ways. My aim here is just to give you a quick foundational primer to get the ball rolling.

RITUAL

A wedding is a rite of passage, and like any other rite it requires symbols. The ritual portion of the ceremony is a way to symbolize your passage from a single state to a married one. There are of course an almost infinite number of ways to do this, including but not limited to:

♥ Handfasting (with a bowtie, ribbon, rope, hair...)
♥ Invocation of the Elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)
♥ Combining of Materials (each partner providing an ingredient, combining them to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts)
♥ Planting (a tree, or a small keepsake box)
♥ Cleansing (washing hands, feet, or even the entire body)
♥ Jumping the Broom
♥ Smashing a Glass

READINGS

For years now I've been keeping a list of great quotes. Whatever your favorite book is, we can probably find a way to include it, but here are a few snippets to get you started:

"This love, earthly love, is a truce between metamorphs, a temporary agreement not to shape-shift while kissing or holding hands. Love is a beach towel spread over shifting sands. Love is intimate democracy, a compact that insists on renewals..."
   - Salman Rushdie

"Something there is in beauty which grows in the soul of the beholder like a flower: fragile -- for many are the blights which may waste the beauty or the beholder -- and imperishable -- for the beauty may die, or the beholder may die, or the world may die, but the soul in which the flower grows survives."
   - Stephen R Donaldson

"And it seemed to him that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but to find oneself, describe oneself. And that whole concept had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man that he can ever touch or understand is that part of himself he recognizes in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can escape his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb."
"But love, if you can find it, you think, might give sex meaning - and give you meaning - might even give life meaning. Love is all you've got then - if you can find it. "
   - James Jones

"Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably. "
   - Yann Martel

"'And what would humans be without love?'
'RARE,' said Death."
   -Terry Pratchett

"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love."
   - Carl Sagan

"The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his
solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."
   - Rainer Maria Rilke

MUSIC

Play an instrument? Got a friend who plays an instrument? Got a phone and a favourite song? There's processional music, recessional music, music that exists for its own sake...

VOWS

This is where you say the words that bind you to the other person. You can choose to write these yourselves and read these yourselves, or we can do a question-and-answer format. ("Do you...?)

Iceland

The final thing to consider, of course, is where you want the ceremony to take place. Here are a few of my favorite NY locations:

♥ Fort Tilden. Extras: swimming, abandoned buildings, milkshakes.

♥ Valentino Pier. Extras: swingles, sunset, karaoke.

♥ The Hall of Gems & Minerals, Museum of Natural History. Extras: Shake Shack, Central Park, planetarium.

♥ St. John's Cathedral. Extras: pastries, books, soul food.

♥ The Vale of Cashmere. Extras: cocktails, museum, ice cream.