The Wedding

Alison Tash, April 2, 2015

Though my wedding involved new in-laws, best man, and lots of friends of my new family, I had a good friend as bridesmaid, one I’d known since we met six years earlier when she was my neighbor for a year in Princeton. Her parents, sister, and other friends of my parents were also familiar.

Because the rabbi, Ed, had taken time to get to know me and explain the Jewish traditions, the ceremony was warm and personal, and had a blend of traditions. In a typical Jewish ceremony, the couple drink wine from the same glass, before it is wrapped in a cloth, and the groom stamps on it, to signify permanence. We used a silver loving cup instead, called a quaich, which a family friend had given us, engraved with our initials. I still have it in my dining room.

My parents had a three-tier wedding cake shipped from Scotland–a dark fruit cake with fancy frosting. It keeps well, so that slices could be mailed to those who missed the wedding. Some people believe that if an unmarried woman sleeps with it under her pillow, she will dream of the man she will marry. There was also plenty of champagne.

Another non-traditional feature of the wedding was that I did not wear a white dress– I thought it would be too conspicuous. I was the opposite of a bridezilla. But I did have pretty pale gold shoes and a matching headpiece, which went with the big checks on the pale blue-gray dress.

I got more use from that dress than I would have from a bridal gown.

The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. At some point, my new husband retreated to the one air-conditioned room to chat with the rabbi and best man, while the champagne flowed, and I tried to catch the names of an army of curious strangers.

It was a relief to escape back to the basement apartment where we would live until we moved to Cambridge, Mass., in September.

It was a nice follow-up that when my bridesmaid married a couple of years later, she had the same rabbi preside, because she had liked our wedding so much.