Help with a Catholic Ceremony

Hello, I am catholic as well and the only catholic wedding I've been to is my own. I had NO Idea what to expect either. We didn't have a full mass.

The wedding is structured very much like a typical mass. just with a wedding tucked in. The processional worked like a regular wedding processional and my dad got to walk me down and "give me away" just it wasn't asked who gives this woman to be married. My dad just put my hand in my husbands hand. Then the deacon gave his opening prayer/remarks. Then we sat down for the readings. We had the 1st reading, responsorial hymn, 2nd reading, gospel, and homily. The homily was about us and marriage and we were able to choose all of our readings.

Then we were called back to the alter for vows. We exchanged those and rings, we did the Our Father (my choice to add) and closing prayers, and the recessional as usual. If you do a whole mass after the vows will be the Eucharistic prayer and communion.

You will be given a booklet with all the choices for readings, songs, prayers, and vows. So, you will get to personalize your ceremony. Ours lasted 25 minutes. There were some restrictions such as no petals can be thrown (so we didn't have a flower girl), things that couldn't be decorated, where my photographer could stand to take pictures. We were married by a deacon and our church is pretty laid back, We were even offered to write our own vows, but that is not allowed in some (I thought all) Catholic churches.

Before our wedding we had 6 meetings with a mentor couple from our church where we discussed things like finances, communication, children, family relationships, etc. We also attended a one day retreat where we discussed some of the same topics in additional to others and were able to go into a little more depth. It wasn't a terrible experience preparing for marriage. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

I'm a Catholic who married a non-Catholic. Contact the church early and choose your priest, and talk to him about what he expects. You may need a few meetings with him to plan the ceremony, and he can give you their parish info on pre-cana options. My church also helpfully provided me with a little pamphlet with their rules, so I know whether there were music restrictions, rules the vendors needed to know (like where the photog could and couldn't stand during the ceremony), whether there were attire restrictions (none at my church), when I could schedule a rehearsal, the times they offered wedding ceremonies (it's a big church so they had limited selections because of all the other weddings and non-wedding events that go on there each weekend).... that kind of stuff.

Do you have any specific questions I can try to answer?