Welcome to my Wedding Day (part two)

How the Pandemic Influenced my Wedding Day

A wedding day in May of 2020 (or most of 2020) was destined to have some type of repercussions from the pandemic. My naiveté had me believing in March 2020 that this pandemic would be finished by the time I was married on May 23, 2020. You can go ahead and laugh if you want. I had no idea what it was like to live through a pandemic, or anything similar. Brides throughout the world were scrambling to figure out what to do. We all could have read all of the wedding planning blogs and books, and we never would have been prepared to plan a wedding during a pandemic.

The pandemic canceled wedding showers and a bachelorette party. My bridesmaids hosted a zoom bachelorette party a month before the wedding, which was fun and unique! I had hair and makeup artists scheduled, but those both fell through due to Covid, so I ended up doing my own hair and makeup. Because of all of the uncertainty, we asked my brother to officiate the wedding instead of our original officiant who had done our marriage counseling. Thankfully, most of the vendors were able to still be there on our wedding day. One of our favorite wedding planning things was choosing cupcake flavors! Our cupcake baker had us over a month before the wedding to choose flavors, and we had so much fun trying all the cupcakes.

As most people know, the pandemic drastically postponed travel and therefore canceled most honeymoons. Our honeymoon was one of the first things we planned, and it might have been our only chance to visit Fiji! We were so excited to go there, but when there's a pandemic, plans changed. We had a mini-honeymoon after our wedding, then we had a honeymoon in December in Hawaii! We loved Hawaii, and it's by far one of my favorite places I've visited, but having to change those plans was still a bit stressful!

By the time my wedding day arrived, I had already made some sacrifices concerning Covid-19. I had invited over 300 people to our wedding, and I made the difficult decision to cut the guest list to about 60 people total. I limited the day to the wedding party, immediate family and family within 30 miles of where I grew up (in a later post I'll share why this was helpful). I cried over this decision multiple times. Do I let 300 people show up and potentially lead to many of them getting sick (aside from the food poisoning... see part one)? Do I postpone the wedding entirely? I was even okay with eloping! We had determined a way of having some distancing at the wedding ceremony and reception, and since it was all outside, I wasn't too worried about that part.

The whole day, I was thinking about my family and friends who weren't present. Three bridesmaids were living states away, and they were unable to be there. I thought about them, people from my campus ministry group at OSU, Ty's family who I hadn't gotten to meet yet, and of course, my family... aunts, uncles and cousins. If you've ever been part of a wedding day, you know the bride doesn't have much free time. I didn't have time to text all my friends and family and tell them I miss them and I am sorry they're missing the day. We were planning on live-streaming the ceremony, so I was glad they would get to watch that and still share in some of the fun!