Fabulous Ceremony Elements to Personalize Your Big Day

We all love a ceremony with a few special moments held within!  Brides often ask me about ways to personalize their ceremony, honor a special person, or just take their day up a notch.  Here are some of my favorite wedding day elements, from the tried and true to the new and nifty!

Unity Candle

The Unity Candle is a lovely moment, representing that the bride and groom have grown into their own family. Typically, a parent on each side lights a tall, thin taper to represent the family of origin. Then the bride and groom take up their respective tapers and light a center pillar candle that represents their new life together, and replace the tapers.

Sand or Water Ceremony

A Sand or Water ceremony represents the blending of two lives. Usually the bride’s sand or water is one color, and the groom’s another. When poured together, the sands will make a pretty design; the water will make a single new color.

While the concept is simple, there are plenty of ways to make either ceremony particularly special. Matching the colors to the wedding colors is always a nice touch. Using special receptacles, such as a family heirloom vase or bottles in the shape of something special to the couple, also helps define the moment.

The spoken part of the ceremony, often done by the officiant, might go like this:

“______________ and _____________, today your separate lives are joined together as one. The two colors of sand/water symbolize the individual life of the past; separate families, separate friends, separate histories. As the contents of these two bottles are poured into the third, the individual grains of sand/drops of water are joined together as one. Just as they can never be separated and poured again into individual containers, so too will your lives be forever intertwined.”

Unity Painting

New and trendy, the Unity Painting Ceremony has a lot in common with the Sand ceremony. A blank canvas is set up on an easel or table, and squirt bottles of paint are set out for the bride and groom. Together, they create their own unique work of art to immortalize their wedding day.

Rose Ceremony

The bride and groom give roses to their mothers (or any parent) to show their love and thanks. After, they exchange roses themselves as a symbolic gift between them as husband and wife. The officant might say something like this:

Officiant:
Your first gift to each other for your wedding today has been your wedding rings - which shall always be an outward demonstration of your vows of love and respect and a public showing of your commitment to each other. In addition, you both have given and received one of the most valuable and precious gifts of life - one I hope you always remember - the gift of true and abiding love within the devotion of marriage. 
You now have what remains the most honorable title that exists between a woman and a man - the title of "wife" and "husband” It is now my great privilege to be the first to address you as wife and husband and for your first gift as wife and husband, that gift will be a single red rose bud. 
(Officiant hands each a red rose bud/or invites mothers to present the roses) 
The rose is considered a symbol of love and a single rose always means only one thing - it means, "I love you." So it is appropriate that for your first gift - as wife and husband - that gift would be a single rose bud. 

Handfasting

In a handfasting, we use a cord to bind together the right hands of the bride and groom. Often a blessing is recited over the cord and then the couple. Handfastings have become increasingly popular, especially in Irish, Scottish, or other Celtic-themed weddings. There are a lot of ways to personalize the cord; color, material, adding charms, braiding, and so on. The officiant can incorporate the meanings into the ceremony reading during the handfasting itself.

Love,

Holly