Weddings are looking a lot different this year, aren’t they?

We have two friends who are planning their weddings for the same date in August, one here in Vermilion, Alberta and one in Regina, Saskatchewan. It has been interesting to hear about the moment-by-moment changes that have been made since we went into COVID lockdown in March. The anticipated numbers of attendees first plummeted, then rose back up a little. Dresses have been held up from being shipped from the U.S.A. And the venues have been changed. All in all, it seems like some things have gotten a little simpler.

As my eldest son Gil has relayed to me via the numerous twenty-somethings he knows that planned their weddings for this year, in the end, all that really matters is the getting married part. If the fluff and the gifts and the mega-decoration and all your millions of friends in attendance are what you REALLY want out of a wedding, well then maybe you need to postpone it to next year. (Or, never. Just sayin.)

Well, okay. Just because I’m not huge Party Girl now, doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the fact that I had a pretty big wedding myself some (gasp!) twenty-eight years ago. In a lot of ways, growing up in the middle of the Borscht belt, in the town I affectionately nicknamed The Ukrainian Wedding Capital of Canada, my wedding was pre-planned. I knew where I would get married (the little RC church in Derwent), where the reception would be (the Derwent and District Recreation Centre), who would be invited (all my friends, all manner of relatives both shirt-tale and front-collar and the twenty people my non-Ukrainian fiance’s family got to invite) and what we would eat. (Hello! Ukrainian food!)

We grew up going to weddings so we knew exactly what to expect. We learned how to dance at weddings, got drunk for the first time at a wedding and got our first kiss there – and second, third and fourth if there were a lot of groomsmen or bridesmaids in the reception line. In a close-knit community like Derwent, back in the day, not inviting all the neighbors to your child’s wedding was… well, it was just not done.

Case in point: this year, as the quarantine had just begun, my mother’s birthday fell on March 22. She would have been 92 this year and I try to do something each year to commemorate the day. Since it was #stayhome, I decided to go through the box of wedding invitations that had come from her house. And then, because it’s me, I decided to “organize” them by date.

These are the stats. From the 1950s, my mom had saved 15 invitations. From the sixties, there were 62. From the eighties, 85, and the nineties, there were 38, one of which was mine.

Oh, and the seventies? From the seventies, my mom had ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN WEDDING INVITATIONS. I mean seriously, I had to go take a nap afterwards. Simon took pictures of the stacks and posted them on Instagram because: 1) He’s a Gen Z; 2) He had never seen a wedding invitation before – him of the age of internet invites; and 3) He (rightfully) couldn’t believe Baba had been invited to well over 300 weddings in her life.

All told, even though I had lived through that golden age of weddings, it was hard for me to wrap my head around. Sure, Mom and Dad didn’t go to every wedding they were invited to – sometimes two (or even, three) weddings fell on the same date. But I do remember when I was growing up that a summer weekend without a wedding to attend seemed a little, well, boring. And if an invitation specified “No Children, Please”, we were horrified to be deprived of a meal equivalent to “eating out”, of stacking up plastic drink cups as high as we could make them and of tooling all around Main Street Derwent with a crowd of other kids, pretending we were the Lords of Flatbush.

The marriage is the most important thing. But there’s a whole lot of other fun stuff that can make a wedding memorable. And right now, COVID-19 is making the weddings super memorable as intentions and guest lists get more concentrated. Going through with happy plans in the middle of a pandemic is always going to be something to remember.

You won’t beat my Mom’s record for wedding invitations this year, or this decade, because it’s just not a thing anymore. But the main thing? It’s still the main thing.