West Coast Wedding: California

**note: I wrote this way back in September but just now realized it was never published. So I'm just publishing it now.

 

Mike and I both had sisters get married this year, one in California and one in New York, and they could not have been more different.  Since my own wedding I have come to learn there is a HUGE difference in how weddings are done west coast vs east coast.  It created some interesting issues when Mike and I were wedding planning but since we come from very similar families it wasn't too bad.  Of course, our wedding was also nothing like our two sisters' weddings this year.  Since Mike and I are both the oldest and the first married in our families, we had to meet certain "obligations" that come out of being the first wedding.  It's too tedious to explain but if you were also a first wedding you will understand what I mean.  Our wedding was fine I guess but if I could redo it there is hardly one single thing I would do the same, but at the time I was very young and trying to please everybody else but like I said it was fine.  It's just one day out of a lifetime.  I think our sisters were able to have a lot more control over their weddings and I hope they were happy with the way things ended up.  They were both gorgeous weddings.

 

 

Is my sister not THE most gorgeous bride you have ever seen??

My sister Kavita got married in March in California, so even though that meant that literally everyone invited had to travel we didn't mind, because who doesn't want to go to the beach in March??  Plus here to CA is cheap (but still, our sisters better appreciate the fact that we had to pay a lot of money in airfare just to attend their weddings lol)  My sister wanted to get married somewhere warm but didn't want to wait until summer here in UT.  Plus, this plan of hers had the lovely consequence of having only those people she actually cared about being there on wedding day, since people had to fly to it.  Everyone else just waited to see her at the reception in UT later on.  I love that!

 

 As I mentioned, the dinner after the wedding was held on the beach into sunset.  Free gorgeous backdrop?  Yes please!  What a way to automatically launch your wedding to the next level.

In West Coast weddings it's assumed that your sisters will be bridesmaids or recognized in some way so we let Kav dress us in what she wanted and even braved the FREEZING COLD OCEAN for pictures.  I wish I had pictures of the gorgeous cake she had at her beach dinner, although I might be biased since I'm the one who ordered and decorated it!.  It was the perfect beach cake, slathered with white chocolate flakes and decorates with starfish and seashells.

 

(To keep things chronological this above picture should have gone before the beach ones, but Blogger is being a pain about letting me drag pictures to where I want them so I'm just going to leave this where it is)

Kav got married in the morning in the San Diego Temple.  It's so gorgeous, it looks like a castle.  In our church we believe that couples have the opportunity to have their marriage last not only "until death do us part" but in heaven as well.  I'm SO PROUD of my sister for making this huge commitment and for turning her life around to be able to make this kind of decision.

 

Kavita had her UT wedding reception 2 months later so we got dressed up again (btw , BRILLIANT.  I feel like this saves SO much stress on wedding day and really wanted to have my reception on a different day from my wedding, but at the time I got married so many years ago it wasn't really "done" to have a reception more than a couple weeks past the wedding date, and since my in-laws were coming from NY it had to be wedding day or bust.)

 

I felt so bad for Kav.  One of the main reasons she waited so long to have her UT reception is that she really wanted an outdoor reception, so she thought if she waited until the end of May she'd be okay.  Sadly, Utah weather in the spring is unpredictable and of course that one day was raining and freezing even though the days leading up to it were sunny and nice.  I was the one who had to break the news to her that we would have to move the reception indoors.  She was understandably heartbroken but was a good sport about it.  So we worked like crazy people all afternoon and everything really looked quite nice.  A lot of west coast receptions are "open house" style so we were kept busy all night as people came in and out.

I love Kavita and my new brother-in-law Joey!  I don't have any brothers, so Joey you are just going to have to accept the fact that you now have 3 sisters because we're claiming you, the same way my sisters claimed Michael!  And it's awesome having another married couple in the family after a long 5 1/2 years of being the only ones married!