theMediaman.com

A weird thing happens when you get engaged in a Web 2.0 world.  Since the word “wedding” has appeared in my Gmail, and I’ve updated my Facebook status, the intelligent AdWords on pretty much every page I visit have something to do with weddings.

I was already aware of how big an industry the “Wedding Biz” is, but it’s really carnivorous. Pretty much every weekend from now until late-Spring will have a wedding convention.  Some weekends have two or more to attend. Every business I guess has to get in on the ground-floor after the proposal, so they’ll have more say as to who supplies what, and gets paid for it.

The only person I know who’s officially in the Wedding Biz works out of Guelph/Kitchener and recommends finding someone who knows the local businesses.  It makes perfect sense, but I’m still nervous having everyone (including people I don’t know) in control of my wedding but me.

For example, I’ve once been to a wedding with a band, and even that was only recently. Before that, I’ve seen everything from a laptop running Win-Amp on randomize, up to a professional DJ with stage lighting.  Now that I know someone who’s a DJ (and pretty good too), I was hoping to hire her.  A Jewish friend of mine who’s also getting married this year told me with absolute certainty, “give that one up. Jews don’t have DJs”.

After some research, it seems that Jewish weddings can’t happen on Saturday, and there’s no particular (pre-18th century) rule against having Christian weddings on Sunday. While logistically the best thing to do is have it on Sunday, most people won’t want to stay late as they’ll need to work the next day. Also, having it on Saturday shouldn’t be too much of an issue for anyone who’s attending an interfaith marriage anyway.

I’ve already agreed to a civil ceremony - something I swore I would never do - in order to settle a few arguments before they started.  Since Simone is Jewish (as is her family), and I am Christian (as is my family), a civil ceremony without any representation of religion is the most politically correct way to handle the issue.  However, I’m not quite ready to eliminate spirituality from The Most Important Day Of My Life. I have felt God’s presence in every part of my life and I just can’t eliminate Him from a ceremony revolving around the importance of “Love”. I think that if I find some sort of compromise for this, then I’ll be okay with having a band instead of a DJ, or having the ceremony on a Sunday instead of a Saturday.  It just seems like a long way that we all have to go before that happens.

Until then, I’m just going to enjoy the attention. Even if it is by a database of online advertisements.