Good thing we have a large by Swiss standards house to house all of our guests, it was very very full for two weeks, and good thing we had a big attic to stuff all of our crafting into. We are also picked the venue well in the end, the ceremony was a 5 minute walk from our house and the reception was also a 5 minute walk, and everything was close to the train station as well.
Once I get pictures I can write about the Hen's night, an afternoon/evening with all the bridesmaids, outdoor park, thermal baths and a very very pink evening dinner!
On Thursday was the official legal wedding ceremony. In Switzerland you must get married legally first before you can make any other kind of ceremony. I needed a friend to be my translator because the entire thing was in German (thanks Jeanette) and we had two location choices, the city hall or the old house museum in Klosters. We went with the old house (and I will post pictures of that later too). You can also only get married during office hours. After the wedding ceremony we got the keys to the ceremony and reception locations and then it was up to Berghaus Erika for a lovely dinner with the wedding party. We came down in the dark on this little mountain road (I saw a fox!) and I kind of slept a bit. There was so much stuff to do and so much excitement that I never managed to sleep enough!
The next day was the huge setup of the ceremony (I've got pictures of that too to come later), Mic and I were running around from Dawn to Dusk, setting up everything for the dining and dancing, plus preparing the food (we made all of the food except for the suckling pig). We also served pizza to all the guests who came on the Friday evening, I had spent two Saturday's ago making the dough all day and freezing it while Mic was having his stag weekend, about 16 pizza's in the end. I don't know how all the work got done, we had so many people helping and I could barely keep track of everything that was happening!
What I loved about the celebration was how much our friends were involved. Donna and Julia made the bouquets and I thought they were amazing!
There was a cute little road we walked along between the photographing points, all in all we maybe spent an hour taking photos at the most.
When we walked to the ceremony our guests were still arriving! We had the ceremony in the middle school, Mic and I had prepared the wedding arch and all the pink flowers (you can only see one in the picture). The flower was a combination of his mother's painting skills, friends crafting skills and my German attempts to buy wood slices from the city wood cutter - apparently the city has wood cutters. I never did learn how to say aisle in German (when I was describing what I wanted them for and what they should look like), I just acted it out....
While people came into the ceremony, my harpist friend Christiane from the Ceilidh band played, and the orchestra I play with played the music during the ceremony!
Here is Claude from the Ceilidh band who married us.
Unfortunately on the Thursday just before the wedding, our original officiant Nikita also from the Ceilidh band who had done a fantastic job of writing the entire ceremony had an unexpected family tragedy and was unable to come. We suddenly had to find a new officiant (Claude who did a fantastic job in both French and English) and rent a sound system (that was our lunch hour on Friday, driving down to Landquart to rent the soundboard and monitors). That morning Christiane had composed a song for us on her harp and played it during the ceremony!
Here am I making a funny face during the ceremony!
We had a wonderful apero after the wedding with all our friends, work colleagues and wonderful random Swiss people I hang out with while waiting at the train station in the mornings.
After the apero we went to the ceremony where Mic's aunt and uncle had taken wonderful control of the kitchen and had dinner under way. Here are the doves that we had made months and months ago for decoration, in the end they took about 45 minutes to make each. I remember one night a bunch of girlfriends came down and we sat around making doves and eating dinner and chatting (and wine, there was definitely wine, some of the doves have some pretty funny faces...).
The table cloths, oh the table cloths. Rather than renting we bought the material from Amazon, borrowed a ~50 year old sewing machine from my friend and sewed about 15 tablecloths. It worked out really well in the end, good thing we had started on all this planning a year in advance!
We had even more music! My Canadian friend Heather planned the pipes to walk the wedding party into the dining hall. Heather was one of the very first people I ever met in Switzerland, the first night actually and it was she who introduced me to the ceilidh band.
Here is a picture at the dining hall, the name tags were also painted by Mic's mother, and we also had paper on each table for the game, we asked our guests to sketch the person in front of them!
The food was fantastic, although to be honest I didn't really taste it, I was having a great time but rather overwhelmed! We had some games during the evening, one game was that all the guests had a list of questions, and if it was true the guests stood up and we had to guess why. One that we missed was all the guests standing were people who had played board games with us. It was practically the entire room! I hadn't realized we had been playing that much.
As a challenge for failing, Michael and I had to sing a song, I picked Alouette, possibly the only song we both knew. All the French tables joined in.
We had a few speeches, a few more games, surprises, and a very fun evening!
The champagne was brought by Michael's relatives from Alsace, I just loved how so many people contributed to the celebration, it made the whole event very meaningful.
The wedding cake was prepared by my friend Kerstin, it took many attempts to find the proper icing and tip in order to make those roses. the foxes were crafted by Sachi, soooo cute! We have foxes since our first date was on something called the Fox Trail in Lausanne.
After the dinner and the speeches and the cake and the fantastic slide show we all went over to the dancing room for the first dance.
And then the Loch Leman Ceilidh band played!!!! First of all, check out the crepe paper background! The wall behind was super super ugly, paint coming off in patches, curtains hanging on by a string. We made it all go away with ribbons of crepe paper. Actually, after the birds and roses and the chandelier with the arduino controlled winking lights, and the photobooth (more pictures to come from that as well!) the crepe paper backdrop worked fantastic without needing a ton of extra work. I found out how to make it on Pinterest.
And the dancing! Most people had never done a Ceilidh before, and we always had people on the dance floor, we danced two sets and everyone had lots of fun! And after the Ceilidh dance we had pop music and dancing and I got to bed at 3am (I'm definitely not a night person so for me this was a party....).
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