The Preparations

Over the years Kristin had noticed numerous Bride & Wedding magazines in the supermarket, and figured actually reading a few was now in order. She was immediately overwhelmed by the thousands of dresses, china patterns, invitations, favors, and helpful advice pumped out by the wedding industry. Articles beginning with phrases like, “How to have the wedding you’ve always wanted” and “Ever since you were a little girl you’ve dreamt about the big day” made her feel like she missed some part of her adolescence and that she'dI somehow dropped the ball by not writing tidbits in her diary on things she wanted to have in her wedding.

Even worse, there were only a handful of 'acceptable' formats for a wedding, though each had many variations. The articles blathered on about examining wedding etiquette in minutia but didn’t really outline how to go about planning for a more personalized event. The amount of information available on the Internet is staggering, but again it follows a very predictable format. We decided at that point to pick and choose the traditions we liked, and to make up the rest as we went.

Various glacier and field trips for Matt's work, that we took together, kept us from doing too much planning in advance. We really didn't start coordinating anything with Kathleen, the Lodge's event planner, until about 2 weeks before we arrived in Talkeetna for the wedding. This is when things really began to get busy.

Kristin announced at about this time that it was her dream for us to dance a Tango for our first dance. Matt thought this was great, except for the fact that neither of us knew had to Tango, or had even ever danced together. Kristin bought a How-to-Tango video, and we spent every morning for the two weeks practicing.

Dealing with all of the preparations and home-made dance lessons were certainly enough to keep us busy, but on the Sunday before our Saturday wedding, our family began showing up. Nominally they were there to help us, but because so little of what we were doing was traditional and we were so far behind, there was little for us to ask them to do. Nonetheless, we got together for lunches and dinners and spent the rest of the time Tango-ing, shopping, and writing our vows.

Neither of us had a clear vision of what our ceremony would be like until the week before it occurred. Our parents were in town and we realized that the longer we waited, the harder it would be to find the time to hash it out. We had already asked our friend Susan to be the ceremony officiator and she agreed (in Alaska, anyone can get official permission to officiate for a day). All we needed to do now was figure out what we were all going to say.

On Sunday night, less than a week before the wedding, we began searching the internet for ceremony ideas. We came across dozens of standard or cheesy wedding vows and ceremony configurations. However, both of us, somewhat independently, came across two pages that had content we liked. The first was here and contained a Dr. Suess-like poem for wedding vows. The caption read something like 'my wife asked me to write some vows, and this is what I came up with. Unfortunately they were immediately vetoed.' Another page contained text of a ceremony in addition to the vows. We downloaded the ceremony text, rearranged it considerably, deleted, added, modified, and came up with a draft that we more or less liked. We then began writing our vows, in the Dr. Seuss style. After less than an hour of writing and giggling, we came up with vows we could both live with. Not really sure if it was the wine or text that we found most inspiring, we emailed the draft to Susan and waited for the response.

Fortunately it was highly positive. Susan made several suggestions to make it more personal, and it went through another brief round of modifications and until we settled on something that everyone seemed pleased with. Our intention was to have the ceremony, like the invitations, be a reflection of our own personalities but also be inclusive of our family and friends by letting them participate as well. The only thing missing at this point was the part where we would actually exchange the rings. We wrote this on the four hour drive down to Talkeetna. We received many compliments on the result, but that came later.