Wedding Preparations (1)
These past two, three months have been quite busy for me because my wife and I have been preparing for our wedding in early May. We became engaged at the end of January this year, but we did not start planning for the wedding until the end of February and we did not even choose the place for our wedding reception until the end of March. These few months have been truly stressful for us, but it was well worth the time and effort.
We had a ceremony and a reception for our wedding, but instead of having both the ceremony and reception at a hotel, like a typical Western-style Japanese wedding, we decided to have the ceremony at a “real” church. And instead of having the reception at the church, which would’ve been more convenient, we decided to have it at a restaurant nearby. I will focus on the ceremony in this month’s column and write about the reception next month.
Deciding the place for our ceremony was pretty much a no-brainer. My wife and I were regular attendees of this church, and it was like a second home to us in Tokyo because we have made many good friends there. And since we knew the pastor, we thought that our wedding would be more meaningful if he became the officiant of the ceremony. And this was not exactly surprising news to me when I first read it, but on a side note, I discovered on the internet that many foreign wedding officiants in Japan were not licensed ministers, but instead, were "Eikaiwa teachers" just making an extra buck on the side. This was another good reason why we did not choose to have our ceremony at different location.
The hardest part of the preparations was deciding on the flow of the ceremony and finding the right people to help us. When we first started planning, we had absolutely no idea what to do, but with the help of friends, we were able to make a wedding program. Afterwards, we started recruiting people for specific roles in the ceremony. For example, we had to find our own pianist, singer, photographer, and florist. And thankfully, it was not as hard as we thought and we were able to find the right person for each role.
Although there were some things that we were unclear with because we did not have a rehearsal until the day before the wedding, we had confidence in the pastor and the other helpers to take care of everything we had asked them to do. And just as we had hoped, the wedding ceremony went smoothly. Actually, it turned out better than I thought it would.
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