Southern Weddings

We are back with more from our Southern Wedding of the Week. The wedding continued on at the {Shack Up Inn} in Mississippi with an amazing Southern dinner including jambalaya, greens, ribs, cornbread and sweet tea served in mason jars. From the bar, guests could enjoy Mint Julips.  The catering was done by Lance Banker, the uncle of the bride.  The cakes were made by JoAnn Brabam, the aunt of the bride.  (Quite a talented family!)  Nuts and sweets came from Clarksdale’s own {Miss Del’s}.  Entertaining guests through out the reception was {Terry “Harmonica” Bean and his Blues Band}.  Photography by {Benjamin Chan}.  Check out his work {here}.  This entire wedding celebration was planned by the bride with special help from friends and family.  Month-of coordination by the amazing Andria of {Andria Lewis Events}.  Andria has been a friend of ours for a while now and we are so honored to feature her.  Check out her blog post on Melissa + Dan {here}.  Happy Friday y’all!  Enjoy those Christmas leftovers!

Describe your wedding flowers: Melissa: We wanted our floral décor to really compliment the organic, homegrown feel of our event. And, as with everything, we had pretty tight budget to work within. We ended up using a lot of planters and vintage accents purchased from thrift stores. A family friend helped us by planting an assortment of wild flowers in bronze and aluminum colanders, which we later hung throughout our ceremony space. Our florist mimicked this design in our reception space by creating a chandelier of colander planters to adorn our buffet area. For our table arrangements, we saved a bundle by using four-inch planters set inside old tin cans interspersed with sprigs of flowers in vintage RC Cola bottles. Drawing inspiration from the region, our florist also worked cotton blossoms into the floral décor throughout our ceremony and reception spaces along with roses and locally-grown wildflowers and cleverly bound our boutonnieres and bouquets with burlap from the local feed and seed instead of ribbon. The resulting arrangements were so much fun and added so much beauty to the space.

Describe your wedding cake: Melissa: We lucked out by having a baker in the family. My wonderful and talented aunt made both our wedding cake and groom’s cake. The wedding cake had a floral topper and was a simple three-tier white butter cream icing construction, with yellow cake and strawberry cream cheese filling. At the groom’s request, my aunt also made a groom’s cake resembling a giant chocolate moon pie, with chocolate cake, marshmallow filling, and chocolate butter cream icing overlaid with a hardened hot fudge glaze. Oh, it was so good!

Our favorite detail of the wedding was: Dan: I don’t know if the setting of the wedding can be considered a detail since it envelops so many other details, but it really was for me. As was mentioned, we researched having the wedding in Chicago, but the costs were just so prohibitive, and we felt that if we did it in Chicago, we would have to follow the same formal conventions that didn’t really feel like “us”. Having the wedding in Missisippi allowed for more of our families to come together for a whole weekend, eating, talking, dancing and just feeling relaxed. The result was a wedding that felt holy because not only were we joining together, but our families had as well. Melissa: I have to say, we had an amazing assortment of musicians help make our event. Through an arrangement with Ground Zero Blues Club, we were able to treat our guests to one of Clarksdale’s musical legends, blues man, Jimbo Mathus, the night before our wedding. For our ceremony, the gospel choir from the church up the road from the Shack Up Inn graciously agreed to perform a selection of old favorites for us. We really enjoyed working with these beautiful people. But the party really got started with Terry “Harmonica” Bean and his band at our reception. People were up and dancing like aerobic superstars by the second song. It was fantastic!

What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome while planning your wedding? Melissa: Of course, planning a destination wedding is never easy, because you’re generally dealing with an unknown location and vendors. However, planning a non-traditional wedding in a non-traditional venue only doubles this stress. More often than not, we were forced to work without contracts and rely on good-faith promises that things would work out in the end. We had control over very little. The good news is that really things did work out for us. We encountered some last-minute challenges with our rental orders and some verbal agreements went unmet, but in hiring Andria Lewis Events to help out with the month-of coordination we didn’t have to really deal with any of these hassles. Also, to save on our spending, we really relied on the assistance and generosity of family and friends to meet all of our catering, photography, and site assembly needs. We still wanted these particular family members and friends to feel that they were able to be guests as well, so a major challenge for us was to find ways that we could support them as much as possible. Again, hiring Andria really helped to this end, as they were able to assist us in thinking through the supports these individuals would need and stay in constant communication with our special helpers throughout the weekend.

Were there any special family traditions you included in the wedding? Dan: It’s not a tradition (yet), but we did have a special moment where we asked both sets of parents to come and lay hands on us for a “parent’s blessing”. Our friend and pastor, Megan, led us in a prayer that helped us to center on what we were there for, to join families and to support one another. Melissa: For as long as I can remember, nothing has brought my family together more than good, southern home-cooking, so we recruited the best of best cooks for this sort of cuisine, my Uncle Lance, Cajun chef extraordinaire. To welcome our guests into town the night before the wedding, my uncle prepared a traditional low country shrimp boil. The fresh Gulf shrimp was delicious and it was so entertaining to see a few of my southern relatives trying to teach our squeamish, yet gracious northern guests how to pop the head off a boiled shrimp. Lance made our favorites throughout the whole weekend – including a breakfast of biscuits and gravy and a reception of BBQ ribs and jambalaya. It was so gratifying to see people really warm up to each other, remarkably so, over plate after plate of comfort food.

What was your most memorable moment about your wedding day? Dan: The most memorable moment for me was actually saying the vows. I was such a cry baby, I could hardly get them out. A competing moment would be walking away from our “wedding chapel” towards our reception hall as the Gospel choir sang “Amen, Amen” right behind us. Melissa was squeezing my hand so tightly and I was just humming along with the music; it was an incredibly sweet and triumphant moment for me. Melissa: I don’t think there’s any experience that tops my trip down the aisle – letting go of my fathers arm, seeing my mom’s eyes filled with joyful tears, and reaching for my new partner’s hand. I was so nervous and excited and I could see in Dan’s face that he felt the same. From that moment on, I was all smiles – we’d finally made it! I was also really grateful for the roles others played in blessing us on our wedding day. Rather than having attendants, we incorporated loved ones into our ceremony through special readings, songs, and a portion during which friends and family came together to essentially “create” our altar by placing symbolic gifts on a table before us.

Scariest moment? Dan: For me, I started freaking out as soon as I heard the gospel choir start singing Melissa’s processional before she had even arrived at the chapel/carport. I didn’t know how to fix the problem, but our pastor just told me to calm down and not worry, so I let go of it and just laughed it off. And it just got funnier when the choir realized their mistake and just started over singing “Oh Happy Day” again when Melissa arrived, but this time they sang it as an ultra-slow dirge instead of the upbeat and cheerful song we’d meant it to be. But Melissa was so beautiful walking up the aisle that I don’t think anyone actually noticed. Melissa: On our wedding day, I was fortunately very sheltered from dealing with any logistical problems – this was, of course, very intentional. Our wedding planners and our special helpers worked very hard to make sure everything was taken care of and they did a fabulous job, for which I am eternally grateful. I’d heard that that there had been problems with counting seating, with our ceremony starting earlier than planned, with steak knives and dessert plates not showing up, confusion among our servers, etc., but by the time I knew about these issues, everything had already been resolved in some form or fashion. As far as I know, our wedding day could not have been anymore perfect. I was so happy to see how people really pulled together to help make our event wonderful and memorable.

What advice would you give to someone planning their wedding? Dan: Do as much work as you can up front, but on the day of just relax. Hiring a wedding coordinator to help us manage of all of our day-of details was really the best decision we made. Melissa: Don’t feel bound to all of the traditional conventions of weddings. We found that, far more often than not, people (even the skeptics) really enjoyed taking part in a non-traditional celebration. It was our initial hope that, in going the route we did, we could maintain all of the sacredness and fun of getting married, while also saving a lot of money and creating an event that was more true to who we are, and I think we succeeded.

What’s next for you as a couple? What are you looking forward to in the future? Dan: As we write this, we’ve just now settled into our new home in Doha, Qatar. We both have jobs working for a few American-based universities out here in the Middle East. We’re hoping to enjoy our time out here, travel a bit, and mostly save up a lot so that when we go back home we can afford our dream home.

Congratulations Melissa + Dan!  We wish you a lifetime of love and happiness together!