How to involve your parents in your wedding ceremony

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.

If you would like a sand jar, and sand pouring glasses engraved with your name and wedding details onto them please contact us for a quote - mailto:admin@gcscreativeoccasions.com.au

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!!!)

If you would like stones engraved with your names or inspiring words please contact us for a quote - mailto:admin@gcscreativeoccasions.com.au

What ideas do you have for a beautiful way to involve parents and inlaws?