A Very Important Date

The night we got engaged, I called and texted pretty much everyone in my phone's contact list.  I bet you can guess what the number one response was.

"Congratulations!  Have you set a date yet?"

Did I mention this was less than 24 hours after he popped the question?

For most engaged couples, picking the "where" is a lot easier than picking the "when."  For us, it was the complete opposite.

Let's start at the very beginning- I've heard it's a very good place to start.

For as long as I can remember, I've had a very specific image of what a bride looks like.  She's young, she's radiantly happy, and she's wearing a long, white, lacy, long-sleeved dress with a crown and a full veil.

What can I say- I'm a detail-oriented person.

My very specific image of the perfect bride comes from this picture:

Isn't she the most beautiful bride you've ever seen? // {photo courtesy of my Mammaw}

 Hive, meet my Mammaw, my dad's mother.  It's fitting, really, that she should provide my image of an ideal bride, because she and my Papaw have also provided one of my images of an ideal marriage- my parents have provided another.  Since I was very young, mental images of My Wedding Day have changed greatly, but my dream bridal ensemble has always resembled this.  (Perhaps with a slightly different crown.)

See, I've always felt a bride should look like a princess.  And princesses wear long-sleeved white gowns on their wedding day!

Disney's Cinderella // image via Rhapsody a la Creme

Disney's Ariel // image via Be Broke, Be Stylish, Be Slightly Boho // whose dress, incidentally, looks a bit like...

My mom's!  chyeah, 1986! // photo courtesy my parents

Disney's Jasmine // image via TruffleShuffleBlog

Disney's Marian // image via Disney Screen Caps

And a real princess, Grace Kelly // image via Fashion-Era // photo by MGM/LIFE Magazine

That settles it, then!  Princesses, and therefore all brides, wear long-sleeved dresses.

That makes a June wedding a bit impractical, wouldn't you agree?

When Mr. Potion and I finally did sit down to talk about setting a date, we knew we didn't want to be engaged for much longer than one year- and he proposed the weekend after Thanksgiving.  Since my vote was for the cooler months, that meant we were looking at a time frame of October 2012 - March 2013.  We knew we'd be getting married in a Catholic church, and the Church doesn't really like having weddings during Lent- a time of penance when we try to step away from boisterous celebrations and over-indulgence- so that meant anything after mid-February 2013 was out.  Getting married in a church also means we have to consider how it will be decorated based on the liturgical season, and Christmas doesn't end until a bit into January.  Neither one of us particularly wanted a Christmas-themed wedding- no offense to baby Jesus, but we didn't really want a Nativity scene in our photos.  This meant that if we were looking at 2013, there would be a short window between the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of Lent- mid January to mid February.  Although we still hadn't picked a physical location for the wedding yet, we knew that we would at least have friends and family traveling from places that get snow, and a lot of snow tends to fall during that time period (this year's freakish non-winter notwithstanding), which could make airline travel away from those places a bit difficult. 

Fall 2012 it is, then!

For the aforementioned concern about decorations, we decided to avoid the Advent season as well- though, ironically enough, purple ended up becoming part of our color palette.  (More on that in a later post.)  Now we had definitely narrowed down our possible list of dates to October or November.  We looked at every single weekend in those two months (save Thanksgiving) and ranked them from most ideal to least ideal.  November 10th got our vote for most ideal, as it's the Saturday of Veteran's Day weekend and I work for the federal government- meaning one less day's worth of vacation time I'd need to take to go on our honeymoon!  We hoped that other friends and family members would also have a three day weekend from work or school and would therefore be enticed to travel to wherever we decided to have this shindig.

Armed with a list of prioritized dates, we sent text messages to the two most important people involved in this wedding planning process- aside from the bride and groom- our mothers!

Luckily, we heard back quickly, and the reaction was positive for November 10th.

Photo courtesy Emile Frey

 How did you pick your wedding date?  Were you as picky as we were?