Here come the girls for an outdoor Humanist wedding!
Lovers of fun and secrets! Lovers of cheese and board games, quizzes and gin. Oh, and leather jackets. What’s not to like? In fact, come to think of it, we really should have thought about having ‘Here come the girls’ as a soundtrack.
Hana and Tam’s Humanist wedding was at The Croft Campsite in Ubbeston, deep in the Suffolk countryside. Perfect for their plans…… informal, family and friends, paella, dancing, firepits.
We’d done a run-through the day before so we knew the site was right, the feel was right and the amplifier worked! Hana and Tam had organised their friends and everyone who was camping overnight had a job. It all felt effortless thanks to their organisation. Organising your wedding in an informal setting can feel as if you are running a marathon but here it just seemed to flow. I bet there was a spreadsheet somewhere!
If you are organising your own wedding which is to be held at a non-standard wedding venue (and who wouldn’t? They are wonderful!), then the strategy of having lots of people on-hand the day before the wedding is an excellent one. An even better strategy is to ensure everyone has their own special task! Hana and Tam certainly had that one sussed. I kept expecting to see a megaphone come into play at any point!
Some outdoor ceremony sites take a lot of ‘dressing’ to achieve the ‘intimate’ feel that a building can give you. You have to work hard on an outdoor site to make it happy. In this case it was simple. The ceremony site itself had a natural boundary, the chairs were in an arc and there were little jars filled with wheat and lavender at the end of each row. It was simplicity itself. That was it. It needed no more.
So, bring on ‘here come the girls’.
We had great music (The Out of Africa theme and Don’t Get me Wrong by The Pretenders), personal vows written by the couple, an intimate handfasting shared with with family and friends.
The final element was a surprise song sung to Hana by Tam, accompanied by Ceb – Something by The Beatles. Not a dry eye in the house – I had to pop over to Hana’s mum to offer tissues! It was hard keeping that one a secret, I can tell you. We had asked that no one take photos during the ceremony but I spotted someone surreptitiously videoing it on his phone. I have to say, I would have done the same. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
In between were fabulous readings and lots of joining in by the guests. It could not have been more lovely.
Hana and Tam – you rocked! I don’t know about you but I had a fabulous day. Thank you for sharing it with me.
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