Saturday, May 15, 2004
Hello.
We have an announcement to make: we're married!
Six weeks ago, we sat down to start planning our wedding in earnest. After an hour or two of trying to decide who to invite, where to hold the ceremony, what food to serve at the reception, and which hotels to contact, we ceased to be excited about ?our day? and became wrapped up in minutia. In fact, we almost had an argument over wedding cake! On a whim, Sarah said, "What if we just eloped and went to Europe for a couple of weeks?" The more we thought about it, the more we realized it was a good idea, so we decided to do it.
We have invited our respective parents to brunch on Sunday; what they don't know is that they'll attend our wedding ceremony before we go to the restaurant. Since we're mailing this letter on Saturday, we can't tell you how it went, but the plan is to tell them, give them 30 minutes to recover, head out, get married, have lunch and get on the plane to Europe. No fuss, no muss.
So, as you are reading this letter, we are enjoying the first few days of our honeymoon in France and Italy. We left Kingston at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday for an overnight flight from Toronto to Paris. We'll be flying from Rome to Toronto on May 30th. Ben's sister Chris and her partner Jamie have helped tremendously; they are holding the fort and looking after Kali in our absence.
Although it has been suggested many times, we will not be hosting a reception when we get back. We certainly don't need any gifts and we want to avoid the headaches associated with co-ordinating such an event. Instead, we are looking forward to several small visits with friends and family over the summer. We'd like to see everyone, but would rather have a few casual social gatherings than a large party.
While we're very sorry that you won't be celebrating a traditional wedding ceremony with us, we hope that you respect our decision and are happy for us. We had a guest list drawn up and you were most certainly on it, but in the end we decided that this is how we wanted to celebrate our love for each other.
We will be hitting some internet cafes while we're overseas, so we'll be sure to send out emails and we'll be able to receive them as well if you want to send any. While we're on our trip, we'll be checking ben_and_sarah@linuxgruven.ca as often as we can.