Lilac Colored Glasses

A few things before I get into the post:

1. My story is finally up at Blogger’s Annex if you want to read it.
2. There is a post today on Suburban Scrawl, a blog I really enjoy, that I think y’all might want to read. Melisa is Jewish and recounts her synagogue’s Purim celebration. In doing so I think she captures what I was trying to express yesterday in my post. I advise you head over there and take a look, because her final paragraph is almost word for word how I feel about my Jewish heritage.
3. It seems that I somehow came across as afraid or unable to express my feelings about the wedding to CB. That’s totally not the situation. Everything I wrote about yesterday had been discussed by CB and I prior to me writing about it. He has even said that if it would really bother me not to have the chuppah then we could, but here’s the thing, I truly think he is more uncomfortable with it then I am sad not having it. And he’s fine having a trellis type thing like Leendalu suggested but my mom made a comment I ended up agreeing with…no chuppah, no trellis, no paying a ton for extra flowers. So it’s all good, really.

Moving on.

Yesterday I mentioned that I occasionally grasp at things to make the ceremony unique to somehow assuage the wistfulness not having many of the traditions of my upbringing. I thought I better explain a bit the differences between ceremonies so that you can better understand why my grasping became over the top for CB.

First of all, in Belgium you have to marry at your gemeentehuis, which is sort of like the “city hall” of the city or town you live in. The ceremony basically consists of the bride and groom, their close family and maybe some friends congregating at the gemeentehuis. The bride and groom each have a witness present (no bridal party or groomsmen) and the couple is married by either the mayor or the city level head of public affairs. There are two versions of a ceremony, the short one that takes place so you have time to go to the church for a religious ceremony (the only “official” state recognized marriage is the one done by the state) or a longer one for those who aren’t marrying in the church. You can opt for either, so even if you aren’t having a church wedding you can do the short ceremony. They enter you into the city records and voila, you’re married. For an extra fee they’ll decorate the room and do a champagne toast. Very recently they began to make an exception wherein you could marry at one other place in your city besides the gemeentehuis, but it’s designated by the city. In other words, if you don’t get married where and by who the state mandates, your wedding is not legally official or recognized.

As you Americans know, it’s the marriage license and certificate that make the marriage legal. As long as you apply and successfully obtain a marriage license from your county you can be married by almost anyone you want, wherever you want. We, for example, will be married by a judge in the Marriott Hotel in Pittsburgh. Also, brides usually have their bridesmaids and grooms have their groomsmen who also serve as ushers. There is usually a procession of sorts where there are often but not always flower girls and/or a ring bearer, then the groom walks down the aisle with his mother, his groomsmen escort the bridesmaids down the aisle, and finally the bride is escorted down the aisle by her father (or whoever it is who is “giving her away”). The person marrying the couple says some words, the bride and groom exchange vows and rings, they kiss and voila, you’re married.

So as you can see, for poor CB, pretty much all of the wedding ceremony will be unique and “unorthodox” compared to what he normally would do for his wedding. I wanted to write our own vows to make the judge’s spiel more personalized to us and CB was game although I think he may have some troubles so he may write his in Dutch. My mother mentioned that people can be ordained online to perform marriages and my older cousin even offered to do that, but both CB and I went with no on that one. But when my mom mentioned getting someone from the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center to marry us I was interested. CB on the other hand, was absolutely not. And I made the mistake of calling him a traditionalist. And he was not happy. We exchanged some relatively heated words over what we each saw as a conventional wedding and eventually I began to realize that CB was already stepping out of almost everything he was familiar with for our wedding in Pittsburgh.

Granted I’ve stepped very far out of everything I’m familiar with on a full time basis on a much larger scale so CB hasn’t really made too much of a fuss about most of what’s going on, but he still had and has every right to draw the lines where he needs to and on that one he did.

But all in all things are going along quite nicely for the wedding and the reception too, although that, once again is something that is very different in Belgium.