Wedding Tips - ARTICLE

• You should remember well that it is your own wedding. That not Mary, or Kate, or Peter is getting married. That this time it is you who has got what you have been dreaming of and getting ready for such a long time. Yes, you are right.  Fortune smiled on you at last and this foolishly happy face in the mirror is your own. And the dress is yours, and you will never give anyone your bridal veil!

• You shouldn’t drink alcohol. Not a little, not a bit. Not before, not during, not at the height of the celebration, not as the curtain falls. A glass of champagne – and that’s it, all the rest is overdose. Collect your strength to believe the above-mentioned facts and do not drink alcohol at your own wedding. At anybody’s wedding – you are welcome to drink the Molotov cocktail, but at your own – never! To believe this, listen to the story about one bride who came to the altar, stared at the bridegroom and mumbled that he wasn’t the one she had been promised and tried to roll into the corner.

• It would be quite good if your darling were convinced of this as well, and you two were abstinent through all the reverses of the wedding commotion. And when the dashing night begins to decline, and the guests’ snoring is lost in the cricket chirps, you and your husband can grab a bottle of your favorite tasty drink and climb a tree where you will finish off billing and cooing and watching the dawn and the guests’ agony.

• You’d better organize the wedding in the open air closer to mosquitoes and farther from the neighbors. But if the weather is bad as usual, you should wrap yourself with the veil and take the guests to strange and beautiful lands. You can exchange the rings standing up to the waist in the Indian Ocean, at the edge of Vesuvius, or in a cradle lift over the Grand Canyon. You can form up the cortege of gondolas and have a feast in Venice, or dive to the bottom of the Red Sea with all the relatives.  If you only had money…

• You should expect a lot from the pile of presents lying in the corner. There have been cases, of course, when keys of a yacht and Kenso toasters were presented to the newly married, but a new broom is better than just another island. And you should be prepared for everything beforehand – you can be given an album with the photos of your only one’s ex-girlfriends, a sealed up but empty envelope, a new table set compensating for the old robbed one, or someone can present a set of bed clothes and swing at your curtains until morning.

You shouldn’t find heaps of historic literature

and try to observe the decencies and follow the traditions. Otherwise your

wedding will be spoiled because the day you have chosen can’t be chosen for

the wedding, and it’s absolutely forbidden to get married in a week, and

especially in two weeks. Because you are not a happy bride but a poor one, you

haven’t sewed linen by hand, haven’t collected the dowry or haven’t ever

held a needle in your hands. The bridegroom hasn’t stolen you, or got you out

of pawn.

He hasn’t asked you in

marriage and the relatives haven’t seen each other before the wedding.

(They’d better not see each other after the wedding as well, but this is

another story.) You haven’t eaten the round loaf and you are incompetent in

the question of who leads who to the altar (by the way, the bride is lead to the

altar by her father, not this spotty medical student). And so on and so forth.