Final wedding tasks

As we all know, there is a lot of front-end planning associated with a wedding. You have the wedding location, the reception location, the invitations, the catering, the decorations ... the list goes on and on. The wedding day comes and you find out all the planning was (hopefully) worth it; that you'll be thankful when it's all over; and that you'll be happy that you can return to normal life in short order.

Of course, that's not what really happens. The wedding day finishes a lot of the associated tasks, but not all. There are the normal wrap-up tasks, such as writing thank-yous and returning duplicate gifts*. But there are things that we normally don't think of. We had extras alcohol to return; doing so gave us $524 back (woo hoo!) but also took about 45 minutes to load into the car and then unload at the store. We had some broken gifts (the dark side of shipping gifts via mail) to exchange. Having done the wedding mostly on our own, we had numerous items to donate to Goodwill, rather than simply throwing away.

And, having had a Quaker marriage ceremony, we had the fun -- yet time-consuming -- task of purchasing a frame for our marriage certificate. It is now hung on our wall, looking gorgeous. I can tell already that I will have many moments where I glance over the signatures contained therein, remembering the kind words said by everyone that day.


* Note on duplicate gifts: Gift registries are phenomenal, except for when the store fails to take an item off of the list. As such, we received various duplicates, where the first person failed to have the item removed from the list. If only there were a better method to make sure this does not occur...

(Day 7)