What happens during the ceremony?

Are you writing your own ceremony?

As the lovely and always helpful Rev. Ann suggested... i would start googling / researching ceremonies.... we wrote our entire ceremony & vows... and got great ideas and inspiration from researching.

I say get to the I dos or the part where I'm married lol

thanks Rev. Ann I will be sure to check out those links.

Personally I would like it to be short and sweet.

Jenn what do you mean writing? the vows?

Well, if you are writing your own ceremony (the whole thing) you'll need to do some research on what you need to include. If you are having your officiant write it, they should be able to guide you.

You need to talk to you officiant. Some officiants want to get to know the couple and then write the ceremony. For my wedding, the officiant had us write our own ceremony. She supplied dozens of ceremonies and we just copied and pasted ours together. Ours had an opening, a little talk, then the vows (we each wrote our own - it's intimidating but I highly recommend), the the ring ceremony, the we did the mothers last kiss, then the closing comments followed by the pronouncing of husband and wife and the kiss. We took the mothers last kiss and closing from the Internet (the closing was actually something I saw on Pinterest that was linked to Celia's website!), but the rest of the ceremony was from the samples provided from our officiant.

I remember my cousin's seemed only like five minutes.

It also might depend on religion. If you are Jewish it is pretty different.

After hiring my officient. She forwarded me lots and lots of ideas and samples from which I pulled together the type of ceremony I wanted. I forarded it to her. She then fine tuned it and sent it back to me with a few questions. I just today forwarded it back to her for completion.

It helps to have a good officient who will work with you to personalize your ceremony to exactly what you want it to be.

I gather info about the couple, put together a ceremony draft, and e-mail it to them for your input as to additions, deletions, or changes. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they don't change anything!

Posts like this make me very glad to be Catholic LOL The ceremony has been the same for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Limited input required (I don't need one more thing to stress over :-)

Anyway, Catholics have 2 readings included in the ceremony so it could be those posts where you're seeing it.

Your officiant should help you with this; in most states, the legal requirements are pretty light....

As for readings and ritual ideas, you're more than welcome to lift anything you want from my pinterest page ' http://pinterest.com/celiamilton. There are several boards that have a lot of different officiants participating, so there is a wide variety of points of view.

My elopement ceremonies, which are VERY simple, are usually about 10 minutes. My personalized ones are 20-25, but never longer than that. There's just no need unless you're doing a mass.

Ours was very simple. Our pastor who did our premarital counseling wrote an amazing and personal ceremony. Basically, it was a prayer, a little background of our growth as a couple, some scripture, vows, sand ceremony, and that was it... About 25mins and do many of our guests commented that it was the best ceremony they had ever seen