No More Merry Matrimony

One of our earliest attempts at adding our own unique flair to our Disney Escape wedding package was going to be in the form of a special wedding cake topper. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm a huge fan of Disney's Robin Hood (it's probably second only to Aladdin as my favorite Disney movie, with The Sword in the Stone knocking on the door in third place), and of course the movie ends with Robin Hood and Maid Marian getting married and riding off into the sunset for their Happily Ever After. This is not only an iconic Disney image, but also one that Girl Scout Fiancée thought would be the perfect complement to our wedding aesthetic. When we discovered that there was a statuette of Robin Hood and Maid Marian in their wedding outfits, we thought it would make a great cake topper.

Exhibit A: Our idea for wedding cake flair.

Over the last few months, I'd kept my eye on the Internet, looking for one of the statues at a reasonable price. Unfortunately, contrary to what I'd hoped, not only did I not find any of the collectibles for a good price, many of the listings I saw vanished as the shops selling the out-of-print statue continued to dwindle. All the while, Girl Scout Fiancée was doing research into the dimensions of the topper, and communicating with our wedding coordinator to verify that it would, indeed, work as a cake topper. The biggest question was going to be weight; a heavier statue would crush the cake, and our wedding coordinator confirmed with the bakery that they could build some supports into the top layer of the cake so that it wouldn't drop right down through the middle.

Finally, I bit the bullet and used some of our wedding savings to buy the statue. The day that one of the guys from the mailroom at my office brought the box up to me, I was shocked. It was huge. At first, I thought that they had only been overzealous with the packaging, but upon opening it up that evening we discovered that the estimated dimensions of the statue were off by at least 50%. We'd also been given the dimensions of the top layer of the cake by the bakery, and unfortunately the statue's base would have spilled over the edge, not to mention that the much-larger-than-expected collectible statue would look really awkward atop the cake. Both Girl Scout Fiancée and I were very, very disappointed; there would be no Merry Matrimony statue as a cake topper.

Sometimes ups outnumber the downs, but not in Nottingham...

A short conversation with our new wedding coordinator confirmed that we could get the included Mickey & Minnie wedding cake topper for our cake, which is pretty cute and definitely better than a lot of other cake toppers I've seen. That only left the decision of what to do with the collectible statue. On the one hand, we could keep it; I love Robin Hood, and it would be a keepsake of our engagement. On the other hand, without it serving as our cake topper, it loses a lot of its sentimental impact, and would really just be another thing to sit on the bookshelf that isn't a book. After some debate, we decided to sell the cake topper to someone else, and use the money for the honeymoon. The whole thing is a bit of a bummer, but in the end I think our wedding day is going to be so busy that there's not going to be much time to think about it anyways. Besides, there's always anniversaries, birthdays, Christmases, and other gift-oriented holidays, and now one of us already has an idea of something to get the other person!