Did anyone see ABC Extreme Makeover on Monday?  I felt so many emotions from this couple whose perfect day included top to bottom plastic surgery, intense training workouts, dental work, designer gown, and more.

I fell in the trap just like everyone else does. My teeth could be whiter!  I could be thinner!  I could work out so my arms are super buff for the big day.

It's too easy as a married woman to say, "it doesn't matter that much!"  It did matter and it's wrong to belittle the concerns.  The question is how to work within those emotions, within our cultural expectations for The Perfect Day, with the Reality of Life, Friends, Family and pimples that invariable show up when The Big Day arrives.

I was scooping myself some ice cream a bit ago, thinking about how much my mother in law loved the ice cream scoop she used while visiting us a few days ago. We have THREE ice cream scoops - clearly 2 too many. But yet each has it's advantages and I couldn't part with any of them.

Choices and options, even for ice cream. I often reflect on opening a store where you don't get choices - need jeans? One brand, one style. Tissue paper? Toothpaste? How much easier would it be to go in and get an item.  No branding, marketing, comparing size versus cost versus quality versus guarentee of success. 

I just finished reading One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.  Weddings have become big business and the choices faced by todays bride far outpaces any bride in the past.  The trick of course is to know you're being duped but at the same time feel like wanting to partake in the maddness.  Afterall, isn't it easier to critique weddings AFTER you have already had yours?

Choices are great but they can also be very stressful.  Even the most calm bride who wishes to have a good, classic wedding, will find herself overwhelmed with all the options - even among a "classic, traditional" fill in the blank (cake/invitations/flowers.)   Then add any opinion (or non-opinion) of every stakeholder of the wedding and what a mad time any bride will have trying to plan anything.

One of our principles in The First Dance is that everything is ultimately about values, not the details or "things" of the wedding.  It's fine to have any trinket, any favor, any item in your wedding but if it's stressing you (or someone you love) then perhaps stepping back and reconfirming just why you want that item will give you much needed perspective.  

One example in my own wedding was going into it thinking I'd just print out the invitations.  Simple, offwhite paper.  No big deal.  Save loads of money.  Yeah... until I opened my first wedding magazine and saw the most breath-taking wedding invitations!  Who knew I had an opinion, let along such a strong, viceral reaction, to PAPER?  But yes, off I went to the internet to locate the two stores in Minnesota that carried that brand.  Fortunately the price would have been exactly 50% of my entire wedding budget, so it was a clear no-go.  But, it got me started.  Yeah, you know what happens next.  I looked at other wedding invitations.  And more.  And more.  And found The Invitations That I Needed.  

I told my fiance about them and we went back to "visit" them.  We even took my mother-in-law, who gasped in semi-horror while my mother kept saying, "it's their day, it'll be ok!"  My mother in law had a view of weddings that differed from ours and we had to always keep that in mind.  Riding the respect train while going ahead with what you want is tricky business.  At least my husband had forewarned me of her possible reaction and was there to defend our choice (so I wouldn't have to - another lesson for another day, when in conflict, blood talks to blood!)  She was great about it and in fact told us when the invitations arrived, her friends actually called her to compliment our invitations!

These invitations were far from plain, offwhite and classic.  Bright, 3 different colored velum paper with a spiral clip.  And yet what was the value underneath the newfound love of the invitations?  We realized (or convinced ourselves) that the invitations set the tone for the wedding and we knew the invitations would do an excellent job of projecting the simple but artistic and color-centric atmosphere we wanted (for our fall wedding.)

So what was not important turned into very important.  But it required a recentering of what MATTERED, how it impacted the rest of the day (and important stakeholders), and where we were going to move our budget around to accomodate these not-as-cheap-as-home-printed invitations.