How to involve your parents and in-laws in your wedding ceremony?
A few personal touches that we did for our wedding were:
Hidden Parent Roses in your Bouquet
- I hid two roses behind my bouquet, so as I walked down the aisle, I gave one rose to my mum, and one rose to my mother in law. It made them both emotional but I love looking back on my photos seeing them clasping their roses.
- We involved both of our parents in a sand ceremony whereby my husband and I poured the sand from the beach where we had our ceremony into a glass vase, my husband then poured orange sand, I poured white sand, my parents poured red sand, and my in laws poured purple sand.
Here is the wording for a beautiful sand ceremony
Today you join your separate lives
together. The separate bottles of sand
here symbolize yourselves as well as your separate families.
They represent all that you are and
all that you’ll ever be as an individual. They also represent your lives before
today.
The bride and groom wish for their
parents to come forward to
participate in the blending of the sand ceremony.
The bride and groom will now pick
up a handful of sand from the beach and place it into the jar. This is to symbolize that they are
beginning their marriage with a base layer of neutral sand which symbolizes
that their marriage is grounded.
Then, along with their parents they
will pour different layers of coloured sand into the container.
As these containers of sand are
poured into the third container, the individual containers of sand will no
longer exist, but will be joined together as one.
Just as these grains of sand can
never be separated and poured again exactly into the individual containers, so
will your marriage and your life will be.
Symbolic Stone Ceremony
- We also involved our entire bridal party and immediate family by having a stone ceremony, where we threw stones into the ocean with the following poem.
At the request of the bride and groom we are now going
to conduct a Stone Ceremony.
This short
ceremony in one where we both honor tradition as well as embracing the
new. In days gone by our forebears and
many of our early settlers could not afford the normal symbolic presentation of
rings at a wedding ceremony. Instead, to
confirm their vows the bride and groom each cast a stone into a nearby stream,
river or ocean.
So, this couple would like to cast a stone into
the water along with the bridal party, their parents, and their grandparents.
The act of casting the stones into the water
symbolizes the married couples unity as long as the ocean flows or the tide
ebbs and returns.
(Everyone cast’s a stone into the water
together!!!)
“Drop a
pebble in the water, in a minute you forget,
but
there’s little waves a-flowing, and there’s ripples
circling
yet, and those little waves a-flowing
to a
great big wave have grown: you’ve
inspired
a mighty river by dropping in a stone.
(round of applause!!!)
What ideas do you have for a beautiful way to involve parents and inlaws?
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