je suis marié

i am married, AKA it takes a village

On Sunday, I got married. We had a really intimate, low-key wedding...in Evian, France. Most people laugh when I tell them that the wedding was "low-key." But really, it was. I did minimal planning for the actual celebration. I didn't flutter fretfully over the decorations and food. I didn't even have to think about the decorations and food, because all of our guests stepped in and contributed to the celebration.

I'm going to share pictures. Unfortunately I don't have photos from the actual ceremony, because, you know, I was kind of busy. I'll nab them from everybody else later. In the meantime, here are some photos I did happen to sneak in here and there with my iPhone.

First, the view. We stayed in a cabin up in the hills. We had a sweeping view of Lake Geneva. The property held a villa and a chalet. Eighteen of us fit comfortably. Here's a photo of my dad in the parents' room. This was his favorite napping spot. Yes, that is a telescope. No, it didn't work.

 

The ceremony was held on the terrace. Jocelyn directed the guys in setting up a little seating area with wooden chairs from the dining room. She lined the aisle with candles and vases. It was actually raining that afternoon, so we kept putting off the ceremony until the skies cleared a bit. Everyone stood around in the kitchen, wearing their suits and dresses. Our backup plan was to hold the ceremony in the living room. This wasn't ideal, because we would have had to move sofas and a table. And an antique carriage full of dolls. (It was creepy.) Plus, Chris and I especially wanted to have our ceremony outdoors. In the end, the skies cleared up for a good hour and a half. Basically, perfect.

 

This is my bouquet. That morning, we headed down to town to pick up some last minute necessities. Jocelyn and I chose the flowers from a local shop. Then Jocelyn, Steph, and I picked a few wildflowers near the property. We went with a French countryside theme.

While Jocelyn directed the boys and parents in setting up the ceremony area, the rest of the girls helped me get ready upstairs. Natalie did my makeup. (She did my makeup for one of my proms, too!) Steph took obligatory "getting ready" photos and affixed a flower to my hair. Patricia was going to help, but somehow got hoodwinked into ironing shirts for Chris, Gabe, Warren, Philip, and Justin.

During the ceremony, every guest (there were 15) whipped out some kind of photographing device...SLR, point and shoot, iPhone...and snapped away. We didn't have a professional photographer, so this was kind of nice. 

Gabe dutifully played background music from my Spotify account. The guests waited around to Yann Tierson's Comptine d'Un Autre Été. My dad walked me down to Pink Martini's Clementine. (I thought that would be fitting, since we were waiting around for the rain to stop.) Then the ceremony ended to Three Dog Night's Joy to The World. I literally finished selecting the songs right before the ceremony. I had a very limited selection...

Chris's dad officiated the wedding. It was short and sweet. I don't remember very much of it, aside from being keenly aware of 15 cameras trained on my bare back, a bee landing on my bouquet, and Chris holding my hand and trying to steal the scrap of paper upon which my wedding vows were hastily scribbled. (He had to say his off the top of his head. I think he didn't want mine to outshine his.)

After the ceremony, we took a billion and one photos. The sun made a nice and long appearance. We decided to make use of the decorations around the house. The telescope, the parasol, the two big throne-like armchairs, the green reindeer pulling sleds on the balcony...

Meanwhile, Philip led a group of people in the kitchen in preparing the fondue dinner. Stephanie and Natalie assembled the salad and laid out some radishes and salt. This, by the way, is delicious. The past month, I've been all about cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto. Now I'm crazy about raw, halved radishes dipped in salt.

Dinner was one of my favorite parts of this trip. It was such a nice atmosphere. We fit all eighteen of us around the long table and passed around plates of food. 

And there was Pimms. Lots of Pimms. And sangria. Frank and Jocelyn were our generous bartenders. They kept our mason jars full. They actually lugged eighteen mason jars over here from the States. What's more, the mason jars had our initials etched into the glass, and our names tied around the lip with twine.

 

For dessert, the boys had cigars and everybody shared twelve little cakes from a bakery in town. We ate them family-style, taking forkfuls from communal platters. Aren't the mini macarons (or should I say, "hamburgers") cute? Even better, by that point, I was tired of wearing a dress (I had already changed into another dress for dinner), so I put on my pajamas. The perks of having a wedding in a house.

 

After the parents went to bed, we made some more drinks, shared photos from our cameras, and even squeezed in a little bit of dancing. Zach put on some music and Chris and I had our first dance. We danced in the doorway between the dining room and the living room, with all the lights turned off. Behind us, Lake Geneva was a dark mass surrounded by tiny, twinkling lights.

At the end of the night, we sneaked over to the chalet and played a rowdy game of mafia. And then the wedding was over.

The whole thing didn't take very much planning, to be honest. And maybe it was a big gamble to decide to have a wedding on vacation property we had never seen before. But I think the beauty of the ceremony was the spontaneity and the intimacy of the party. Everything came together so well, and most of it couldn't possibly have been planned beforehand. We adopted a "roll with the punches" attitude. With a flexible schedule and carefree guests, we were able to let the little issues slide and adapt to last minute changes.

More importantly, our family and friends really pulled together the perfect wedding. On their own initiative. They just stepped up and got busy. I don't know what we would have done without them.

Most of us traveled together to Wengen, Switzerland. Now we're cooking pasta in the cabin and having some down time. I'll make some halfhearted attempts to update the blog, but if I end up spending all of my free time sitting on the balcony, eating creamy yogurt, and staring across the valley at the Alps, you can't really blame me.

A bientôt!