The wedding planning process from start to finish involves a thousand little cuts--er, decisions... These decisions range from venue to flowers to custom-designed coat-check slips (I kid you not). Superficially, of course, I am told that we must identify a theme, be it a color, concept, font, barnyard animal, blah blah blah... Without this organizing concept, I am told, our wedding risks slipping into the sleepy grave of the unimaginative and unmemorable. God help our marriage.

More and more often, I'm seeing weddings as brand. Polished couples imprint their wedding concept on everything from personalized pencils to cocktail napkins to bridesmaid undergarments. Every detail is magazine-ready, and I can't help but wonder (unless the couples work in graphic design) if the bride has been working on her wedding since elementary school -- refining, refining until just the right groom came along. Perhaps it's an inverse Cinderella, and she waits by the window until she finds the perfect groom upon whom she can slip the hand-tailored tux unaltered...

I confess I am drawn to the coordinated weddings with visual and thematic coherence from STDs (that's save-the-dates, for you, dear readers) to send off. I have spent more than two decades pouring over home design magazines admiring similar aesthetic discipline. Perhaps it's a fault of my imagination, maybe it's the ADD, but I can't seem to keep to one overarching Wedding Vision. The details that delight me are diffuse and varied. With nine months to go, who knows what my eventual wedding will look like?! Nonetheless, I know what I do enjoy about planning a wedding celebration:

1. In the end, no matter how many things go wrong, chances are I'll be married to Adam by the end of the weekend. (I'll give it till Tuesday when the courthouse opens).
   
2. This may be the first and last time we get all of our parents and all of our closest friends and relatives together under one roof to break bread. It will be such a chaotic, intergenerational mess that it can't help but be fun.
   
3. So often, when I'm contemplating wedding details, I'm thinking of particular friends. I am thinking about my mom admiring the door handles in the bathrooms (you'll see), the fall foliage for Val, the stamps for Moose and Amy's invites, the many birds for Michele and Charlie, and so forth... It is imagining their reactions to these little details that gives me joy.
4. The Wedding Weekend. I look forward to all our many parents playing board games and drinking wine and getting to know one another. Our families are so different, but I also imagine a crazy compatibility being discovered. I see Carole and Toni thick as thieves. There is a reason why Adam and I fell in love, and it has everything to do with the people who raised us.

Tonight I went out for errands and dinner with Pamela, inundating her with my latest musings. She pointed out that a current theme of ours may be "education." Can education be a theme? I have seen couples pull of beautiful and clever schoolhouse themes, but perhaps we will look at a different facet of our educations and growth as individuals, and now together as a team?

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