This week has been kicking my butt thanks to one of the daughters of an Amish family we are friends with getting married. If you are married or have been married, you might think you know what it is like to prepare for a wedding.
You don’t.
Imagine having the wedding at your house and feeding several hundred people but doing so without the benefit of electricity or having a car to go to the store. Then imagine having dozens of women come to help prepare all of the food from scratch but most of them are dragging half a dozen little kids or more so the whole time you have 50 children running around plus a dozen babies crying, needing to fed and changed. Yeah, it is chaos.
In general the Amish do all they can to avoid drawing attention to themselves. But on her wedding day the bride gets to get kind of fancy and be the center of attention for the day so it is a major deal for them to plan and prepare for that one day, even more so than “English” girls.
Anyway here are a few pictures of the set-up. I am pretty glad the wedding is over so life can get back to “normal”.
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| Most of the year this room holds farm equipment |
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| The bride’s mom baked and decorated the cake |
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| The “corner” where the bride and groom and two pairs of side-sitter witnesses sit during the reception. |
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| During the actual marriage ceremony, the bride and groom sit across from one another with two friends paired up on either side. |
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| The guests at the wedding, in this case the ceremony is at the bride’s grandparent’s place |
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| The wedding party buggies decorated for the two mile ride to the reception at the bride’s home. |
It looks like scenes from another planet. A wonderful planet.
They have plenty of problems of their own of course but the difference is that they are manageable problems.
It is quite enlightening (for those that do not know) that the Amish have that time period where they can experience non-Amish life before fully committing to that religion…