April’s Showers Bring a Unique Wedding Memory

I remember telling my mom that I wanted to get married in a garden when I was nine or ten years old. I’m not sure that I gave it much thought since then, but when my boyfriend proposed over two decades later I still felt the same way.

However, when we were setting the date only April seemed to work, and an outdoor wedding in Vancouver, BC seemed to me to be destined for the kind of wedding shower that I would like to avoid! Others might automatically move their ceremony back into the traditional church setting, but now that I was an adult I had other reasons to prefer an outdoor wedding. My boyfriend and I did not attend church so we didn’t feel right using one for our wedding ceremony. We discussed it and we both agreed that the outdoors felt more sacred to us than any manmade building.

I looked at weather information  for our wedding date for the ten previous years and it had only rained once, but then I’d look out my window…

I’ve lived in Vancouver for over half my life with two temporary moves (to Toronto and New York City) and I love Vancouver a lot, but I couldn’t deny it was often wet outside and April was downright drizzly. I had to be realistic – I wanted to get married outside but I wanted everyone to be dry and comfortable even more.

The next step was to look at gardens that were either enclosed or had a covered area that could be used on rainy days. I found a few options but they were either beyond our budget or would not accomodate more than a few people, and we had eighty guests.

The wedding date approached and I was already looking at my options for the reception: hotels, caterers, halls… and I was starting to get worried about staying within our budget. Then, my friend Keith told me about a wedding he had attended at a local heritage building that was being used as a hall.  The ceremony and the reception were in the same room – the chairs from the ceremony were moved over to the dining tables and the cleared area became the dance floor! It was an old stone building with a clocktower, it had high ceilings, and lots of big windows. As an added bonus, my mom was thrilled because it kind of looked like a church! I was thrilled when I discovered how inexpensive it was compared to the other places we looked at.

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I thought, if I can’t have my wedding outside – I’ll bring the outside in.

I really started to get excited when we wandered around a big warehouse that rented greenery and other props to the film industry. I rented two big cherry blossom trees. Their branches touched and formed a canopy to stand under during the ceremony. I also rented a park bench and some fake grass. I bought a wrought iron fence to put around the base of the trees to complete the park setting. We also used real cherry blossom branches to decorate the stair railing that led in to the building.

When April came around, the city started its annual burst into color, so many streets lined with the vibrant blossoms; the sidewalks covered in a carpet of red, white, and pink petals. The cherry blossom trees called out to me,, reminding me that my wedding day was getting closer and closer. Suddenly the trees we picked for our indoor wedding seemed perfect, it wasn’t as if we were indoors but, instead, as if th whole city was decorated for our big day.

We used a cherry blossom motif on our wedding programs and the bridesmaid’s walked down the aisle to “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White”.

Then my two best friends, Jodi and Kristine, bought us two real Cherry Blossom trees as a wedding gift. We planted them in our front yard and they blossom each year for our wedding anniversary.

Do you have a story about how you found the silver lining in anything that threatened to cloud your wedding plans? We’d love to hear about them!

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