This selection goes out to my dear friends Sarah Carter and Iain McPhie, who have a little event planned this weekend. The invite said something about “marriage,” so I decided to do a bit of research on the topic. I stumbled across this advice from J. R. Miller’s The Wedded Life regarding the much-anticipated wedding day, and thought it appropriate to share. Cheers, Sarah and Iain! Love and happiness to you both.
1912: The Wedding-Day
The wedding-day is one that shall ever be remembered and held sacred among life’s anniversaries. It is a day whose benediction should fall on all other days to the end of life. It should stand out in the calendar bright with all the brightness of love and gratitude. The memory of the wedding-hour in a happy marriage life should shine like a star, even in old age.
It is surely worth while, therefore, to make the occasion itself just as delightful as possible, to gather about it and into whatever will help to make it memorable, so that it shall stand out bright and sacred among all life’s days and hours. This is not done when the marriage is secret; there are no associations about the event in that case to make its memory a source of pleasure in after years. Nor is it done when, on the other hand, the occasion is made one of great levity or of revelry; the joy of marriage is not hilarious, but deep and quiet.
On the wedding-day the happy pair should have about them their true friends, those whom they desire to hold in close relations in their after life. It is not time for insincerity; it is no place for empty professions of friendship. Everything about the circumstances ~ the festivities, the formalities, the marriage ceremony itself, the congratulations ~ should be so ordered as to cause no jar, no confusion, nothing to mar the perfect pleasure of the occasion, and so as to leave only the pleasantest memory behind.
These may seem too insignificant matters for mention here, yet it is surely worth while to make the occasion of one’s wedding such that it shall always be remembered with a thrill of delight, with only happy associations and without one smallest incident or feature to mar the perfections of its memory.
Source: Miller, J. R. The Wedded Life. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath School Work, 1912.
~ p. 11-12 ~