Paying for the Wedding

As of today – the last hour or so, we have now paid for more than half of our wedding (the biggest expense, caterers, isn’t due until May 1st). I’m very excited about it! Never been so excited before about paying money – the Fiance and I danced around the living room!

Earlier on, we wanted to pay for things in full as they came up, but suppliers don’t like you doing this. I can see their point when small changes incur huge faffs rearranging what is essentially small change on the scale of the total cost – and I have changed our flowers a few times, although they didn’t even want a deposit from us!

So we paid deposits, like good children. But then today we received a call from the registrars saying that they wanted payment 12 weeks before the wedding day, and we were overdue! It is now 29 days… We’d never known the payment date (or had an invoice for the amount!) so we looked up the fee on their website and paid it electronically, presuming we’d got the right amounts.

Everything in the garden was lovely. The Fiance updated our budget spreadsheet and made a list of everything else we’d paid in parts – flowers, transport, food and drink… And thus began the furious invoice hunting.

I located two – the cars and the flowers. Christopher cars were out at a wedding when I called them, but are going to ring me back to let me pay. Their payment was due on the 18th – two days ago (oops – but at least we realised and I contacted him!).

The flowers, as I mentioned, didn’t even have a deposit on them. I trawled through the email conversation I’d had with Jemma from Austin Flowers hoping to find out when they wanted our money. When I eventually found it, it wasn’t very specific either – payment was due before the week of the wedding – around the same time as the catering.

Well, I decided I didn’t want to do this again in two weeks time, and it’s a Friday afternoon, so they should be open. I called up Austin Flowers and explained my business to be greeted with a very cheerful, “Oh! I’ll just look up your invoice!” In fact she sounded delighted that she wouldn’t have to chase me at some later date; I suppose if you’re as relaxed about payment as they seemed initially, it does fall to them to do all the chasing.

Payment over the phone was quick and painless. Another expense sorted: hurrah!

Meanwhile, the Fiance was investigating other suppliers. The Town Hall didn’t pick up the phone, so he left a message with them, and they replied by email shortly afterwards telling us that we didn’t need to pay them anything until the 5th of May – two weeks prior to the ceremony.

He also emailed Oxon Carts – the rickshaw company. They hadn’t given a date for remaining payment either. A few minutes later he got a response: the balance was due tomorrow: they were going to email him then, but he’d beaten them to it. Excellent. So I transferred the rest across online, and the Fiance gave them our payee reference code and explained what we’d done.

Sorted!

The only thing left is the Somerville drinks reception, which the Fiance’s parents are in charge of. The Fiance is emailing them everything they need.

Balloon Trees

I have been making balloon trees.

The idea started because of a leaflet tucked into our brochure from the Town Hall, for ‘The Balloon Lady’. I got excited, went on her site, and looked at various things. This inspired me:

It then transpired that the Town Hall won’t allow helium balloons, because if some prat releases them, they float up to the ceiling and set the fire alarms off. So my idea was caput. Balloon arches and such forth were too expensive, but it did occur to me to try making little decorated balloons on sticks to line the aisle of the ceremony room with, and later dot about the reception.

My first attempts at balloon trees were very basic. I first tried to secure the balloons to wooden sticks, but these expeditously popped the balloons, prompting me to go out and spend £7 on balloon sticks.

Iris was also very involved:

We didn’t know how big a pot we’d need, so tried a plastic cup and plant pot filled with the soil. Plastic cups weren’t too small to hold the trees down, we found, and there is obviously the usual problem with the plant pots – holes in the bottom.

Which brings me to the next dilemma: the soil. This was kinda heavy for transporting the balloon trees, kinda messy (they would have to be packed and carried upright), and seemed to need to be of a certain moisture level, which was a new kind of palava I wasn’t happy to deal with. So we tried to think of something new. After a bit of faffage with coloured sand (prohibitively expensive, and didn’t solve the moisture and weight problems) I was browsing Christmas decorations and realised that salt dough might be our way out.

It is lighter than soil, and solidifies such that, moulded into the cups, it will not drop bits everywhere, fall out if tilted, or mucky people’s fingers.

On the other hand, I hadn’t made any salt dough since I was in Woodcraft Folk.

So never mind: it could only go wrong.

We decided to use the plastic cups we had. I’d’ve bought some paper ones which might have looked nicer, but the Fiance was keen on these cheap semi-see-through plastic ones (why???), they were free, and we could always change our minds later and only have wasted a bit of time. He also suggested we could dye some of the salt dough blue so that, in lieu with the inspiration picture, we could have blue and white balloons in white and blue pots. It would be pretty.

I was a little dubious about the dying process, as blue food dye is not the most reliable of things, and as I expected, they actually came out a little green. But nevermind.

For this, I spent £1.58 on salt (two 750g packets of salt) and used flour and food colouring we already had (I did use up all the food colouring, but there was plenty of salt left over, so I’m sure it equilibrates somehow or other).

So I shoved 24 plastic cups full of salt dough into the airing cupboard (thus demoting the cat’s sleeping place to a lower shelf) and left them to dry. This took a few weeks. You can cook salt dough in an oven or microwave to set it quickly if you’re making Christmas decorations, but because we wanted them moulded into the shapes of these plastic cups, and I thought they would deform if taken out of the cups, and there was no way I was putting plastic in the microwave, we left them to dry in their own good time.

Looking at the finished the base, they still looked a little… naff. I wasn’t completely happy with the free plastic cups (can’t you get blue ones sometimes? Why didn’t we have those?), but they were full of salt dough now… so how could I improve them?

I decided to have a go covering them in paper to see if it looked any better. I painstakingly cut out a template by attaching, pencilling, clipping and reattaching until it was the optimum shape to wrap around the plastic cup (not easy when the base is narrower than the neck), stuck it together and decided it was good, I would do 24 of them.

12 of these little buggers were done in ordinary white paper, and the other twelve were done in blue, from spare backing paper my mum got from work. Such was the size of the template, I could get 3 per sheet of A4, though they didn’t exactly tesselate well.

To glue them to the pots I used ordinary PVA glue (spent £2.99 on a nice big pot, as we were using it for lots of things), which I applied with a paint brush to the upper and lower rims (the major and minor circumferences) of the plastic cups, with a “seam” down the side in one place where the edge would rest.

I allowed myself just the smallest amount of overlap (about half a centimetre), where I glued once again. If the fit at the top and bottom wasn’t perfect, I erred on the side of leaving a gap at the top. The chances of anybody noticing in any direction were slim, but with the cup rim at the top, upper perspective view into the cup and putting ribbon round the white ones, I felt pretty secure in concealing any mistakes.

Some of the edges needed holding in place whilst the glue set, so I found that even though I was using a paintbrush, I had to wash my hands a lot during the synthetic process, in order to avoid gunking up one balloon tree with the residue of its successor.

When finished, they looked pretty good. I covered teh white dough ones in white paper and blue dough ones in blue paper, just for symmetry. As mentioned, I also used a piece of our blue ribbon round the top edge of the white ones to add a touch of decoration. We didn’t have enough ivory ribbon to do this to the blue ones and my attempts with satin were not too successful, so I let it go. In any case, because the ribbon was edged and the cups narrow from top to bottom, trhe fit was less than perfect, so that those balloon trees sporting ribbons were left with a kind of wobbly “skirting”.

I had a think for a few other ideas, but in the end tissue paper, pom poms or finer ribbon were lacking in either effectiveness, resource, or both.

I think they’re good enough as it is like this.

So, the next step was to construct a new version of the balloon trees (since the pink soil ones). We haven’t bought our balloons yet, because we tried to ask the boy in Card Factory how long they would last before they perished, and he was too thick to understand what we meant, and seemed to believe we wanted to blow them up now and then use them for a wedding in June (no matter how many times we reiterated, he didn’t seem to get it, and we were never sure when he said yes or no, whether he was just trying to resolve the discussion)?! So we decided to wait until closer to the time to buy balloons @ £6 for all the ones we needed, just in case, had we spoken to somebody with a brain, they’d’ve advised us the balloons may not last.

In the meantime, we had no balloons for constructing our trees with… what were we to do?

The answer was – go to a balloon.

The chemistry ball was decorated with blue, white and black balloons (nice convenient colours), and at the end of the evening many of them were cut loose and thrown about the room, since they were filled with helium. Some of them stuck to the ceiling and others rose a bit and then sank down to land on people’s heads. We “borrowed” two and brought them home for balloon tree making.

So here is the apparatus:

The small plastic bit in the middle, the bit which joins the balloon and stick together, was decorated using balloon curling ribbon (£1.88), which I curled with a pair of scissor and attached with the aid of sellotape. I have masses of the stuff remaining.

All that needs to be done now is put these bits together (although obviously for thwe wedding this construction processes needs to take place on the morning of the wedding, but hey, this was a trial with free balloon).

And voila! For a total price of £19.46 (hm, sounds like a lot, but we do have leftover glue and balloon ribbon), we have 24 fab little balloon trees to decorate our wedding with, clean, not perished and of transportable size and weight. I’m sure the ushers will love putting these together…

Registering Interest

So how do you get married – you know, the legal stuff? This was something we, like most people, had to find out about (not knowing off hand and all that), mostly through researching it on the web. So for anyone who still has any queries about it, here is our experience, and as many tips as I can think of.

Unless I’ve forgotten something, there are four kinds of wedding:

Humanist (Scotland only)
Religious (general)
Church of England
Civil

And they all have their own quirks!

Humanist Weddings

I don’t pretend to know much about Scotland’s legal system, but in general their attitude to weddings is better: more relaxed, less restricted and if you have a humanist ceremony they really invite you to make your wedding your own. You can have a civil legal wedding followed by a humanist ceremony in England, but the humanist bit alone isn’t legally binding – so it’s more like a blessing.

The wedding is conducted by a celebrant, and you can choose your celebrant freely, get in touch, have a chat and decide how much you like them. The celebrant will then tailor your wedding ceremony to suit, sending you ideas or extracts from other ceremonies to help you come to a decision. You can incorporate your own beliefs or belief system/s into your wedding, whatever they may be and however they tie in to established religions.

Usually, celebrants are happy to travel all over the place to perform their services, so you don’t have to restrict yourselves to those based locally. Fees vary, depending on the individual celebrant. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, celebrants can choose appropriate fees within an agreed band, whilst Scottish celebrants have a fee decided by unifying organisation. However, this is not the full picture, because celebrants may charge additional fees, including an ‘appearance fee’ and sometimes the licences and certificates are charged outside the basic fee. If in doubt, ask.

Religious and C of E Weddings

Getting married in a church or other religious shouldn’t be taken lightly nor done to keep the family happy. This is a huge commitment – because you are committing your marriage not only to each other, but also to god. Lots of discussions touch on the hypocrisy of being married in church if you’re not religiousas though you are offending the church by pretending to be one of their followers (because the church would never pretend they had more worshippers than they do, would they? Ahem census data versus the British Social Attutides Survey). However, there is another aspect of it: if you don’t believe in god, and you promise in your vows to commit to god as much as to your partner, doesn’t that make your vows – and thus the foundation of your entire marriage – a lie? Perhaps I’m too scrupulous, but I couldn’t take my partner’s commitment seriously if they were lying in the same breath just because some man in a robe told him to.

The message is this: if you’re getting married in church, whatever your usual beliefs, on this occasion, mean it.

Now, if you’re having a religious wedding, you need to start by going to the church/synagogue/mosque or other building you wish to get hitched in, and they will do your paperwork. Talk to whoever is in charge there and discuss the requirements for a marriage. There are usually lots!

The building you get married in may be restricted by certain requirements. For C of E, you need to live in the parish for 6 months or have a personal connection to the place (e.g. your parents got married there/live in the parish). If these don’t apply, the religioius official will probably either say no, or make you jump through other hoops, such as regularly attending religious services there, to make you prove it’s not just all about the pretty building.

You also have some choice over who performs the ceremony. If you want someone other than the priest/vicar/rabbi responsible for your building to perform the ceremony, you have to have the agreement of another official to come and marry you AND ALSO the agreement of the priest/vicar/rabbi who would be the default. This means that if you sufficiently piss off your vicar, they can forbid you to be married in their church by anyone other than themselves.

If you have been divorced you will need to discuss this with them and they may make you do more hoop jumping, or insist on bringing it up during the ceremony (ouch). It is probably best to ascertain from the start where they stand over this.

Hoop jumping

If you’re not regular church goers, you may need to start going regularly before the wedding to show your devotion to the church and its community. This is especially likely if only one of you is of the appropriate religion. In the case of Catholicism, you will need to promise to bring up children as Catholics and you may need to keep quiet about living together! Some religious officials will insist on baptising an unbaptised/non-religious spouse, most commonly in Catholicism. However, this is not universal and depends entirely upon the individual establishment.

One thing you will be asked to do is to go to a marriage preparation class. For some religions and ceremonies this is compulsory, and for others it is merely recommended. This usually involves counselling to check that you know how to communicate, that you’ve thought about the implications in living together and that you have discussed/know what to expect from sex and contraception/childbearing (especially if you’re supposed to be virgins. I think this is compulsory in Catholicism, but a lot of the time someone comes to specially talk about sex, whilst the celibate priest just sits back and watches. However, in some cases you do have to discuss your sex life with your celibate priest. Erm… ew).

In general, religious weddings are the most expensive, but this isn’t always so. The cost of getting married in church starts at a base fee of £321.50, which includes your banns, the legal fee and your certificate. You can save £22 if the church you marry in and your home church are the same, as then your banns are only read once.

On top of this, most churches request a “donation” which brings the fee up to at least the £500 mark, and is very dependent upon the individual building. Flowers, bells, choirs/organists are all additional costs which will be added on top of this if you want them and will be subject to availability and priced up by each church to their own satisfaction. Fees can easily get to £700/£800.

If you are having a C of E wedding, your vicar may be invested as a registrar, and can perform the entire ceremony under the negotiated fee. If not, or if you are having a wedding under a different religion, you will need to get the registry office involved: your religious official will perform the ceremony and one registrar will be there do teh paperwork and validate the marriage. The fee for this is a little less than a civil wedding, as you need only one registrar, and will depend upon the fee guidelines in the county you’re getting married in. Sometimes your religious official will deal with the registry office for you and include the cost within their own fees – so it’s important to ask.

Civil Weddings

Currently, the only way for a same sex couple to marry is through civil partnership, although fortunately it does look like this may change soon. And plenty of opposite sex couples, like me and the Fiance, also marry civilly. And this no longer means a quick registry office tying of the knot!

You can get married in any registered building, although no room in any building can be registered for civil AND religious ceremonies – traditionally if there is a chapel that will be for religious ceremonies, and other rooms for civil ceremonies. Non-religious buildings may be registered only for civil weddings. Further, for a civil wedding you don’t have to get married anywhere near where you live or anywhere with an association to you/your family. So there is plenty choice.

And you don’t have to get married in a hotel! When we told our parents we were getting married, we were asked, “Hotel or registry office?” and our reply was “Neither!”

You can find out which buildings are registered at Direct.Gov, which is generally a very good place to go for advice on civil weddings. And if you don’t understand it, you can give them a call!

All sorts of buildings are registered – town halls, restaurants, country houses, conference centres and heritage buildings! – and despite what the myths say, you can get married outside – so long as the outside location is registered and within the confines of a registered building (there aren’t many!). In Somerville College, you can marry in the Fellow’s Garden, and some venues have gazebos or pavillions which are licensed.

Choosing a venue can be tricky, as you have to balance having the venue and having a registrar to bundle. For this, you have to give notice. When my uncle and aunt got married, they couldn’t do this until 5 months before the wedding, after they had booked the venue and everything else, so my uncle camped out outside the registry office and made sure he was first through the door to secure a registrar! Now you can give notice up to a year in advance, which takes the pressure off a bit. We booked our appointment to give notice in advance of the 1 year mark, and then turned up when the time came around.

So what happens when you give notice?

First of all, you need to make sure that you give notice in the district in which you live, not that in which you wish to marry, unless they are the same. This means that if you live in separate districts you will have to give notice separately. We actually gave notice in Oxford, then moved to Birmingham, but that’s okay. We lived in Oxford when we gave notice and thus have only had to deal with them. If you’re in this position just make sure you tell them your new address when you move, as it will help with the paperwork later on.

For giving notice, you pay a fee of £33.75 each, and a notice of your marriage is then displayed in the registry office for 16 days, so that if anybody wishes to object, they may (they won’t, don’t worry).

At your appointment to give notice, you will have to state the time, date and location of your wedding, and after you have given notice you can change the time/date but not the venue – or you have to give notice again! You will then get asked a few questions: first that you’re happy to marry and are doing so freely, then (each taking turns in going out of the room) your partner’s full name and date of birth, and occupation. You will also be asked for your own details and they will be cross checked. If you get something wrong they will ‘black mark’ you on the form, which means they will note it as an inconsistency. From everything I’ve heard, you can know none of your partner’s details except their first and last name and get away with it, though!

One thing there have been differences of opinions over is the subject of fathers. Traditionally, the woman would not have an occupation, so her father’s name and occupation would appear on her marriage certificate. Registrars will still ask for a father’s name for the bride, and sometimes for the groom. IF YOU DO NOT WANT YOUR FATHER’S NAME ON YOUR MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO GIVE IT. I asked and was told it was unnecessary. I think they can also take an alternative “guardian”‘s details instead too, but none of this will be appearing on mine.

We were given a form to take away with us and fill in. This is usually requested back about a month before the wedding, but there’s nothing like being organised. It asks for details like the names you want used in your ceremony, whether you want any children mentioned, readings/readers (and copies of the readings to be checked), your witnesses and how you want to be announced at the end of the ceremony. It gives you the option to have your own vows or use some of theirs. The only legal compulsory bit are the Declaratory and Contracting words, for which you have to pick from their selection. You can pick any combination traditional/modern/simple, but you can’t change anything about them in the slightest, e.g. merging two versions. These words must be said before 6pm for the marriage to be valid.

Readings are very popular in civil ceremonies to pad them out and as an alternative to hymns; however, you are not under any circumstances allowed to have any god in them whatsoever. No mention of beliefs, no quotes from traditional vows (e.g. “for better for worse”)/calling your lover your angel. None of that whatsoever.

The number of readings you’re allowed again depends on your county. Oxfordshire are quite relaxed, and whilst there are 3 spaces for readings on the form they gave us, they’re happy for 3 short poems and a piece of prose. Some counties only have 2 spaces for readings. If you’re unsure, ask.

We’ve handed our form in – well, actually we scanned it into the computer and emailed it to save postage – but we didn’t actually finish filling it in! The registrars are quite happy for you to submit some information later than others, as long as they get to check it, so we haven’t decided on our vows nor how we want to be announced at the end of the ceremony.

On the wedding day itself, you will need two registrars: one to perform the ceremony and one to bookkeep. You have no say over who these are, but when they are allotted (usually 4-6 weeks before the wedding, depending on your county) you will be able to meet them or speak on the phone (and I suppose if they were incredibly offensive you could lodge a complaint, but you would then be randomly allotted a replacement, assuming there were grounds for your complaint!). Ours is allotted a month in advance, so I don’t yet know whether we have to chase up a meeting or whether we will be invited for one, but I have a sneaking suspicion it is the former!

The fee you pay for your registrars depends upon the county, time of year and day of the week – so getting married on a Saturday in May is around £400. Less if you get married on the premises.

Other Bits

It’s worth mentioning that other restrictions apply and vary between different kinds of ceremonies. The major one is photographs, and when you photographer is allowed to take pictures and move about. Churches are particularly bad about letting photographers take pictures during the ceremony, even with flash off. Some registrars/celebrants prefer them to stay seated (which is fair enough) and others are quite free about it. For our wedding, Oxfordshire are happy for our photographer to do her stuff, the only limitation being no pictures of the actual register – which is fair enough as it contains other couples’ details! Again, if in doubt, ask.

Turning the Tables

Circular or rectangular tables? It doesn’t sound like that big an issue, but one thing I have learnt from interloping through the wedding world is that tiniest details are matters of greatest controversy.

I decided we’d have round tables. I went to a wedding with round tables. The balls I’ve been to had round tables and in this picture of the town hall they have round tables, which look pretty:

But then I recently came across this picture of the same room set up with rectangular tables:

The Fiance went to a wedding recently with long tables, and Somerville always had long tables for hall… but we’ll stick to round – we did decide on round (and more importantly, the table runners have been cut).

Our decision was fairly straightforward, partly because we found it fairly trivial, but believe me, I was tensed and ready for battle.

There areso many controversies with tables. Not just their shape, but where they are in the room (too near the buffet, loud people, or people they don’t like), whether anyone is sitting in front of a table leg (surely unavoidable most of the time?), whether there is a top table (we have one; he wanted one) and who is on it.

Seating plans can also be a nightmare. We decided to fit 79 people onto 9 tables rather than 8 to ensure that everyone was sitting with someone they knew or someone they might get on with and to keep groups together where possible, or divide them into big happy chunky portions who might get on with the rest of their table, whilst able to lean back and poke So-and-so who was sitting at table 8.

Top tables have always been controversial because of deciding who to put on it, especially with extended family or step family, with +1s, odd numbers and who is doing the speeches. A lot of brides and grooms don’t like being on display, not having someone opposite to talk to, having to sit with certain guests and having a lot of junk like a flower arrangement or ‘Mr & Mrs’ signs cluttering up the table in front of them. These are all things you should take into account, try to keep everyone happy and basically just pick something sensible and easy. Tables will not change your day.

Some couples cut the chase and have a special sweetheart table, but this doesn’t appear to be very popular. Others have a migrating bride and groom, with a place set for them at every table. Personally, I prefer the German tradition of visiting each table for a shot during the meal, which at least involves everybody and not only those lucky enough to be seated beside them.

A Plan Emerges

We’ve been working on our table plan – a black art of grouping the guests, seating X next to Y, rotating the tables and deciding upon photograph angles, coupled with prodigious skill in the cut and paste department using Paint and a scanned plan of the Assembly Room from the Town Hall.

Anyway, we named our tables and decided how they should be arranged. I even corrected the number of chairs around each one to properly represent the angles and spread. The reason all the tables are sized up is that this copy of the plan will go back to the town hall to aid them setting up. I’ll be making a few more versions – for the guests, for the caterers and for setting up each table.

All to produce something a little more like this: