Wedding Wednesdays

Late last year I suggested to Girl Scout Fiancée that we set aside one night a week to work on wedding stuff, and I had suggested Wednesday since that was one of the few nights each week that we could usually guarantee some time together. This was an outgrowth of an earlier idea I had, which involved us watching one Disney movie a week in the ramp up to the wedding and honeymoon, so all of the movies would be fresh in our minds when we reached Disney World. As things often do when you're busy, we never really got either of those things off of the ground, but by the luck of the calendar (with New Year's Day falling on a Wednesday) we had the perfect excuse to kick 2014 off right, starting up Wedding Wednesdays today (yes, we're calling it Wedding Wednesday, a name that beat out MatriMondays, Tie-The-Knot-Tuesdays, and There's-Still-Time-To-Back-Out Thursdays).

Though Fantasy Fridays might still be on the table, if I can get Girl Scout Fiancée to buy some princess outfits.

This evening, after Girl Scout Fiancée made a delicious batch of Hoppin' John as our New Year's Day dish (black eyed peas for luck, spinach for money in the new year), we started by talking about a cocktail hour. Last year, our wedding coordinator had suggested that we consider adding a cocktail hour after the ceremony. According to him, with these afternoon ceremonies guests sometimes tend to wander off instead of sticking around for photos, and a cocktail hour helps give them something to do. We've also been concerned about the amount of time folks would have to go get dinner and then be back for our dessert party at Epcot, and we recently got some news about said dessert party that really nudged us toward considering adding hors d'oeuvres in the post-ceremony, pre-dessert party time. Apparently, the Canada Overlook area where we're having our dessert party isn't great for photos of the bride and groom silhouetted by fireworks. With that being the case, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to pay for a professional photographer to come to the dessert party, so we're considering taking the money we would have spent on that and instead putting it toward the hors d'oeuvres. We also just bought our plane tickets (non-stop redeye on Alaskan Airlines from Seattle to Orlando? Yes, please) and ended up spending less than I'd budgeted, so that plus the photography money should cover the costs of a cocktail hour. So, our first task for Wedding Wednesday was combing through the catering guide that our wedding coordinator sent us last year and seeing if we could put together a basic menu. We came up with two potential menus, and a whole bunch of questions, so my next task was composing an e-mail to Danny asking him about the details of the cocktail hour. We'll see what he has to say, but if things pan out I think the transition from wedding to dessert party is going to go much more smoothly.

Did you know that wedding guest boredom is the #1 threat to fun in America today?

The next task for Wedding Wednesday was to start putting together the mailing labels for the invitations to our Seattle reception. Girl Scout Fiancée designed the invitations on Invitations by Dawn, and we ordered our first wave before the holidays. We've had to break out list of folks we're inviting into different waves, since our venue can only accommodate a little over 100 people, and we know a lot more than 100 people. So our first wave consists of people who live out of town who we would like to come, but we're not sure if they will. Once we get our RSVPs back from them, we can send out the second wave, which consists of our local friends. We're pretty sure we're going to be able to have everyone come that we want to, since we don't expect a lot of out of town friends to be able to make it; Seattle is in a pretty remote corner of the country, and it's a long way to ask people to travel for a four-hour event, especially folks with kids. Still, some of our dear, distant friends might surprise us, so we need to check with them first before we go crazy inviting everyone I've ever gamed with here in Seattle. I spent a little while compiling mailing addresses, printing address labels, and sending e-mails and Facebook messages out to everyone else collecting their addresses. The best part is, I get to do it again in a couple of months!

With one sheet of address labels in hand, we headed down to the living room for the main event of the first Wedding Wednesday: a screening of the new The Little Mermaid blu-ray that I got Girl Scout Fiancée for her birthday this year (which, as she was quick to point out just now, alerts all of you that Girl Scout Fiancée just had a birthday). While we watched the movie, I wrote the names of each potential guest on their invitation (by hand; each of these invitations is blessed with my very touch!) and then Girl Scout Fiancée put the appropriate mailing label on them. Now we need only attach postage (and return postage) and the fine folks at the United States Postal Service will send forth the summons to Seattle for all of our distant friends and family.

They shall come to my wedding reception like Vader summoned before the Emperor.

I'd forgotten how much I liked The Little Mermaid; it's just got a certain magic to it that makes me grin when I'm watching it. Like many Disney movies, it's much shorter than it is in my memories. I guess when I saw all these movies as a kid, they seemed to last so long (especially compared to a 22-minute episode of He-Man), but the movie zips along at a brisk pace. There's no slowness in the film, and even the songs are over before you realize it. Unlike some of my staple Disney favorites, like Aladdin or The Emperor's New Groove, it'd been a while since I'd seen The Little Mermaid, so I kept saying, "Oh yeah, I love this part!" in my head over and over again. I'm really looking forward to each subsequent Wedding Wednesday so we can delve back through the Disney vaults and I can remember why I liked each one of them. Next week is likely going to be the new Mary Poppins blu-ray (also a Christmas gift I gave to Girl Scout Fiancée), and then after that we'll see.

Hipster Ariel meme: where the Venn diagram of Seattle resident and Disney fan overlap.

I'm hoping that, by setting aside Wedding Wednesday for us to work on wedding stuff, we're going to be able to slowly and reliably chip away at all of the things we have to do before the wedding and honeymoon, and the Seattle reception, instead of trying to do it all in one big blast right at the end. Plus, with the carrot of getting to watch a Disney movie every Wednesday and continually psych ourselves up for Disney World, there's something to look forward to other than sticking address labels or going through checklists. There's also some fun tasks yet to do, like writing our vows and maybe working with our officiant on the ceremony, so it's not all work. The big drawback is that we actually only have another 16 Wedding Wednesdays to go before the actual wedding (conveniently also on a Wednesday), so we won't be able to watch all of the Disney classics. What do we prioritize? The princess movies? Only our favorites? Only films we haven't seen in a long time? We've watched The Sword in the Stone recently, and Mary Poppins is next week, but other than that we've got to make some tough calls. I know Robin Hood has to go on the list, and I really want to put Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella on there. What about Peter Pan? Lady and the Tramp? Lion King? Mulan? I feel like I also want to put Aladdin on there because it's my favorite, but I can quote that one more or less verbatim; do I really need to watch it again? I have a feeling Girl Scout Fiancée and I need to make a list soon so we don't end up leaving off something one of us really wants to watch.