T Minus 7 Days and Counting

One week before our wedding day, we woke up to find that it was freezing cold. Now, we have lived in southern California for the last five years and what happens when you have lived in southern California for that long is that you forget there are days when the temperature can go below 55 degrees Fahrenheit (about 13 degrees Celsius). Pretty much anything below that feels “freezing cold” after you have lived in a place where the average temperature is about 65 degrees. Year-Round. (You also start doing things like get cranky when the sun stops shining for two days in a row, but that’s another story.) Normally, when the temperature drops in December, we take it as a nice reminder that winter has arrived. But, when you have planned for 80 guests to be standing outside at 6pm for your wedding ceremony, then sit outside a (covered) patio for dinner, when the temperature drops like that, you start freaking out a little bit. It was probably foolish to believe we could pull off an outdoor wedding in December, even if it’s in southern California, but foolish we were and now with only 7 days to go and weather.com predicting a 20% of showers, we were starting to fear a disaster on our hands.

The next morning we woke up and it felt as if icicles were hanging off our noses. As we laid in bed, dreading the cold, thinking about our failed test run to warm the patio even though we had put up plastic sheeting all around the sides and used 3 gas heaters, we pretty much just freaked out completely. We counted and recounted the seats we had around the house and realized that even with creative seating (i.e. counting both toilet seats), we would be able to have no more than half of the people stay comfortably indoors. The Sunday before the wedding became a mad scramble to figure out what we could possibly do to pump heat into the patio.

As we laid in bed, afraid to move for fear of the cold and of the pending disaster, we told ourselves that no matter what, we would be married on December 10. If need be we would do it in our kitchen, with a 6pm ceremony and a repeat 6:30pm showing for those who couldn’t get close enough to view it the first time. We hoped we wouldn’t have to resort to that, but the most important thing was to get married so that we can start a family. It would be nice if we had a nice wedding and all our guests could enjoy it, but you know what? If we can survive a hellish miscarriage and a year and counting of infertility, our family and friends could probably survive a few hours of discomfort.

After this realization, we were able to unlock ourselves out of our fears, call up party places to find the only one that still had console heaters to rent to heat up the patio, buy a tent under which to hold our ceremony and get ready for the last crazy days of wedding preparations. We were quite pleased with ourselves to have worked through the weather crises. I even allowed myself the thought that perhaps everything would be smooth sailing after this point.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA