Our Green Happy Wedding

 

You know when people compare their wedding to a classical orchestra, where everyone knows how and when to play its part, and the result is this beautiful,airy classical music that plays for the entire wedding day?

Well, our wedding was a drumming jam session. And we played our part whenever it fit in the music, and danced until late in the night :-)

Our wedding was absolutely beautiful and one of a kind!
I believe it is because our friends brought their good energy and made it work!
I was wondering how i would describe my wedding....the technical part? how to make a wonderfu green  wedding under budget? Or just...flow with how we made it happen, from my perspective, or just tell about the magic that seemed to surround the whole process?
Well...maybe I'll just do a mix of all the above! I'll mention some pricing along the line just to show if you think green weddings are more expenive, think again!

 

Our wedding date was decided in July, which means we had a little less than 3 months to put it together. None of our families were part of it, because they live so far away (Israel and France) and because of the timeframe. But don't worry, we WILL have celebrations there too! It's just a matter of time.
Not having family but friends only has advantages and inconveniences. Inconvenient, obvioulsy, because we would have loved our parents and siblings to be here with us. Advantages...mmmh...I'll have to think about that. Maybe it allowed us more room for improvisation?

Anyways, here is what we did for our wedding that held about 40 people.

The goal was to have a memorable, joyful party with our friends, in this special place that is Chochmat Halev where we met lots of amazing friends, in their garden in particular which I particularly like. Obviously we wanted good food –organic, local, vegeterian and kosher-, good friends and we also decided to have a ceremony following the Jewish tradition while letting the room for other beliefs, as I am Atheist and Aviad is Jewish. Since I have no tradition per say I was very keen on taking on Aviad's, I think ceremonies play an important role in special events and this is one of them. We added our own "tradition" with Akiva giving a meditation session before starting the ceremony. Bringing all your invitees in a synagogue to have sanskrit singing, you have to have very special friends for being able to do that.

Here are the highlights of what we did for our ceremony:
 

Designing the place:

Chochmat Halev is a wonderful meditation center and they were kind enough to let us use everything we would need: linens for the tables, vases, plates, glasses, and big plates

I bought some cutlery that they didn't have at Ross, and some white linens. We will have other events so I'm guessing the cutlery will come very handy. Total cost for this Ross trip (yes that's how I found the shoes too!) : $96

I also had plastic and carton cutlery/plates and glasses from older events that I brought "just in case". Reuse. During the event, the glasses were not ready so the carton glasses came handy. We didn’t need to use the plasticware which was a relief since they are not biodegradable.

Flowers: I wanted to have lots of wild flowers for my wedding (no roses) because the symbol of wild flowers was stronger to me than any other symbol: diversity of our community and friends, freedom, represented by the wildernerss of the flowers, natural, as we all share this passion for nature.

My friend Mona Lisa and I went up to sonoma to get these flowers 2 days before the wedding at a PYO (pick your own farm, the Green String Farm). We cut our own flowers, about 200 flowers for 100 dollars. I spent Friday morning with making bouquets out of all these flowers and took the greens from my garden.

Total designing the place: $196

Green: Reuse (cutlery), flowers (organic and local)

 

Food:

Food was the main expense and I estimate the total including wine and champagne (that we lost and never drank!) $1100. Note it is not expensive because it was vegeterian dishes, and despite using all organic and fresh products. Our friend and amazing cook Ilana  did the dinner with help of  the rabbi's daughter we hired for the day.  The menu was so amazing, and as the bride of course I didn’t get to taste every bit of it, I was too excited and wanted to talk to everyone …no time to eat! But what I had the chance to grab was delightful. I can only wish for you Ilana will post her recipes on the website some day... I'm hungry just thinking about it! Green: local food for the most part, organic, vegeterian and kosher. The other cool thing is we have naam bread for the rest of our lives, and so do our friends!

 

  Music:

 The DJ we were getting canceled 3 weeks before the wedding. We found another one and given he is not a "wedding DJ" –more a nightclub DJ- he did a very good job with taking on this challenge !. He came with a recommendation from our friend Nissim and we were very happy someone would take care of the music!

Organization:

There is something about friends. They want to take part! And they happily did so. During my quest to find flowers and my dress, it was very heartlifting to have my friends screaming over the phone "Yes! I would love to come with you of course! It's going be so much fun!". Ok maybe it's a girl's thing. It IS fun to cut flowers and look for a dress...

During the wedding, Alon came to Aviad and I and said we shouldn’t take care of anything and just enjoy, and he kindly brought us food and organized the sitting. I have to say it was really awesome because I was overwhelmed and organizing while being the center of attention is impossible! So Aviad and I sat back on our chairs and let it go. And it worked marvelously! I don’t think I have one picture when I'm not smiling or laughing, and the same goes for Aviad. I had the best time ever!

Special Highlight: the bride (me!)

The wedding dress: my friend Amanda found me a white dress in a thrift store in Oakland. I think the dress was the least expensive of all our expenses. $8 + 1 hour cleaning $16 =$32. Dress accessories: vail and 2 feather flowers to change the look of the dress to make it look like a wedding dress. This is the (very) expensive parts, unless you know how to make a vail, which I don’t. $225. The shoes: I found shoes at Ross for $5, while actually looking for cutlery (see below) They were not exactly new but as they are very opened, I don’t think anyone noticed. Hair dresser: I had a new cut + a special wedding hair dress for $85 including tip, which is particularly inexpensive if you are aware of prices for bride's haircut.   Total money spent on the bride: $337. Green: Recycle: dress Local: vail and feather flowers are hand-made and from a local store in Berkeley, hair cut 0.2 miles from home, thrift store for the dress in Oakland.

A word about the Rabbi:   We are so blessed to have met Rabbi Sara because we have a new friend now. I'm always impressed to see Sara and her genuine kindness. What strikes me is despite she has my mother's age, her eyes (of a beautiful green) reflect the innocence of a teenager. And somehow I just want to hug her! She managed to make a –more often than not- boring ceremony into joyful, funny and yet deep and true moment, inviting all our friends to participate, which they joyfully did (Alon with the singing, Eli and Merav with the pictures and everyone passed along the holy glass of wine to put a wish in it).

 I had the most amazing compliments about this wonderful event, the words that would come back the most were "genuine","happy", "true". We did not try to mimic a vision of a "perfect wedding", we just stayed true to ourselves, and asked our friends to do so -did we even had to ask?-, and somehow, even when leaving place for improvisation and having a somewhat loose organization, we just trusted our friends to bring joy and good will, and they came their hands full of it!  For us, it worked wonderfully!

see more pictures and videos here