Memorable New and Classic Wedding Ideas

Now that the annual engagement season is over, wedding planning is surely full steam ahead for many couples. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to attend, be in, and coordinate quite the variety of weddings over the past four years. While each wedding that I’ve been a part of has been wonderful in its own way, here are some sweet ideas that I have particularly enjoyed.

1. Throw lavender at the bride and groom as they exit the church: there’s no smell like it, plus it’s ecofriendly.
   
2. Do a yoga class the morning of the wedding with any interested wedding party members, friends or family members.
3. For a summer wedding, design a classy and useful combination program and fan.
4. Incorporate the phrase “Eat, drink and be married.”
5. Share different spice mixes as favors: love is the spice of life. The wedding I attended gave out a choice of barbecue mix, Italian herbs, or chai spice. I’m still enjoying mine!
   
6. Incorporate eucalyptus into your wedding flowers—it's hardy, beautiful and it smells great. As with lavender, you also get some nice aromatherapy.
7. Have the parents of the groom pray over the bride and the parents of the bride pray over the groom during the ceremony.
8. If you have musical skill or perhaps a hidden talent, surprise the class by sharing it on this once-in-a-lifetime day! I’m thinking of a particularly great evening where we got the groom to do an encore of Bennie and the Jets after serenading his new bride with a love song.
9. Play the couple's dance game to see which couple has been married the longest. I was truly impressed by the married-for-75-years grandparents at the most recent wedding.
10. Place infused water dispensers around the ceremony and reception to keep everybody hydrated and happy throughout the celebration. Try cucumber, lemon, mint, raspberry, grapefruit or almost any fruit combination.
11. Green tea cupcakes. I’m not going to offer any explanation.
12. As you’d like, incorporate groomswomen/a best woman and bridesmen/a man of honor: if the bride has a best friend that's a guy and the groom has a beloved sister, put them in the same clothes as the groomsmen and bridesmaids, but let them stand on the most appropriate side.
    
13. Start a train, ideally one led by a grandparent or an elementary-aged cousin—you won't regret it.

Happy 2017 wedding season to all!

Photo credits go to my wonderful former Furman University photography classmate, Hannah Woodard Lockaby of Hannah Woodard Photography. See more of this beautiful wedding day of my sweet friends here.

A Coffee Shop Friday Morning

I've always loved getting to experience life from another's point of view and coming to understand them more fully in doing so. When it comes to strangers, visiting local grocery stores is one of my favorite touristy adventures. When it comes to friends and family, I treasure the chance to be a fly on the wall and watch them in their zone. In the last year and a half, I've eaten in the Senate cafeteria with a brilliant college friend who worked there, managed to pose as neither-a-student-nor-a-guest-lecturer in a middle school music class session taught by my best friend from college, ventured through the disco-ball and country music-filled upstairs bedrooms of my brother's fraternity house and now, I've witnessed my mom as a coffee shop lead barista.

While home visiting for Thanksgiving, I jumped at the chance to join Mom for an unusually short shift on Black Friday morning at Land of A Thousand Hills Coffee in Bradenton, Florida. We left the house earlier than usual (when in vacation mode) with her in a red t-shirt emblazoned with a beautifully bold and simple "DRINK COFFEE. DO GOOD." As we drove down the Palma Sola Causeway towards town at 7:13 am, we watched the sun rising higher in the sky. As both my mother and I are prone to do—for better or for worse—she shared her thoughts on the situation unsolicited: "It's not a consuming thing, I just love it when I'm there." I was excited to fully experience the place that had reenergized her over the last year.

Mom unlocked the doors, tied a funky wrap around her waist, turned on the designated Pandora station and got to work bustling around checking on and prepping things while I settled down at a wooden table and sat on chairs covered in wonderfully mismatched leftover Nigerian fabric donated from my grandmother's collection. I worked on analyzing the options for replacing my beloved digital camera and buying some gifts from Noonday, happy to enjoy Black Friday discounts from the pleasant, line-and-traffic-free coffee shop. When the neighbor with the day's opening shift at Wells Fargo entered as the first customer, Mom introduced herself and kindly walked out and said, "Let me give you a hug." Wary of his broken arm in a cast and fully aware of my mother's tendencies, I jokingly mentioned, "Watch out, she's an aggressive hugger." There were quite a few more welcome distractions throughout the day: I met the twenty-somethings that she worked with, the caterer who supplies all of the food, a guy who used to coach at my South Carolina university and one of my grandmother's AAUW friends out for breakfast with her granddaughter. I happily noticed the cute couple on a chatty coffee date, the mother and four-year-old who worked on the communal puzzle while waiting for their breakfast, the people stopping by on their way to their offices and the families and twosomes communally enjoying some post-Thanksgiving deliciousness. I chatted with my brother, Chris, and his friend Aaron as they ate turkey bacon sandwiches. I stole a taste of a mocha chill that Chris had gotten after Mom had unsuccessfully tried to sell both boys on Samoan chills, claiming that they were “just like the Girl Scout cookies” and making sure that they knew that whatever they got was her treat. I discussed Nashville tourist spots with Mom's coworker.

 

In between meeting people and making my ecommerce decisions, I admired the retail options (t-shirts, mugs, and coffee with extras) and made the not-so-difficult decisions to enjoy a rare green tea latte with a morning glory muffin, some pleasantly orange-infused water and later, a surprise curried-egg wrap with star fruit on the side and a round two of the hearty vegetable soup that I had both discovered and fallen in love with on Wednesday. As an avid listener of coffee-shop-approved music, there were only four songs that I didn't already know and love on the playlist in the four hours I stuck around. Colbie Caillat, Sarah Bareilles, John Mayer, Norah Jones, an acoustic duet cover of Cher Lloyd's "Want You Back", the Fray, Phillip Phillips, some of the calmer Bruno Mars and Jack Johnson were great company. I was very much unsurprised when it took an hour and 18 minutes after Mom's shift had ended to actually get her out of the coffee shop—she kept running into people that she loved or helping with just one more task. It was my favorite kind of morning: relatively productive, fun, and filled with opportunities for people-watching, chatting, and most importantly, tasting.

Streamlining Your Life (Originally for Greenville Pulse)

As I've said before and will surely say again, I wish there were more hours in the day. In middle school, I wrote a persuasive (yet somehow not yet victorious) essay that all weekends should be three days long instead of two (partially so that I could focus more on family and partially so that I could get more done). One of my favorite moments is when I was being introduced at a ceremony right before college graduation and they said, "after stealing the time turner from Hermione Granger, Jessica..." Until I can buy a time turner (to be delivered by an Amazon drone, obviously), I have come to terms with the fact that I’ll have to be disciplined about maintaining my priorities.

Sometimes you need to break away from everything to recognize the good and vital from the extra. An acknowledgedly ridiculous recent occurrence provided an in-your-face illustration: I had a Pyrex glass bowl that was a favorite for carrying my lunch to work, and one day, I realized reaching into the kitchen cabinet that it had become perfectly wedged inside of a casserole dish. We tried soap, butter, and various strange methods and could not get the two to separate, rendering both useless. I finally realized that I had to give up one of the items in order to be able to use either again, but didn’t yet want to go through the effort of breaking the bowl out of the casserole dish. I set it in a storage bin in my room and set that bin on a shelf, and recently came home to find that the bin had fallen to the ground, leaving the casserole dish shattered on the floor and the bowl again available for use. I hadn’t quite gone through with the hard decision that I had to make, yet gravity had taken charge. Whether it's time, stuff, emails or otherwise, take some steps reestablish your dominance and reclaim your space, your schedule, and your energy.

Here are a few of the best survival methods and tips that I have found. Please feel free to share your favorites!

• Six years ago, amidst a bit of an overwhelmed-almost-to-the-point of pseudo-crisis phase, I briefly made decisions by considering the following:

1. Do I have to do it? 
2. Does it help someone and/or advance the greater good?
3. Do I want to do it?

         If an obligation didn’t meet any of these three categories, I didn’t do it. Life went on, the crisis dissipated and I used time more wisely.

• Another favorite decision-making aid: “In five years, what will I wish that I had done?”

Reclaiming space and gaining freedom from extra stuff:

• For every item you buy, get rid of one item.

• Start each year with all of your hangers reversed. At the end of the year, think seriously about donating the items that you haven’t worn unless you can convince a trustworthy friend that you should keep it.

• Donate duplicates unless you commonly use both items at the same time.

Saving time and energy:

• Filter promotional emails to go directly to your trash, where they will be for 30 days and you can easily find them if you're looking to shop/travel/etc. within the time that the promotions are relevant. Unroll.me is also a great tool for reducing the number of promotional emails.

• When you're out shopping and notice an item that is well-priced, too awesome to miss, or fits both categories (jackpot!), buy it and get ahead of the curve on the holiday, birthday, baby shower or wedding gift shopping.

• Do errands whenever they are convenient. Don’t put them off until they are really inconvenient, and by that, I mean, don’t get stuck paying the overnight shipping, driving to the craziest retail corridor in town on Christmas Eve, or frantically cleaning the living room two minutes before guests are supposed to show up.

• Reclaim some of the time you waste on your phone and/or social media by downloading the Self Control app for your computer or a phone usage tracking app for your smartphone.

Now, break out the bowl and reclaim your time and space.