Well folks, our wedding year kicked off with a small living room ceremony in our Phoenix home on December 5, 2020.
Due to COVID restrictions and logistics, we decided to keep the wedding ceremony extremely limited—just meeting Arizona’s legal requirements.
Present were one of our officiants, Becci Collins, her husband, and Scott’s mom as our two witnesses. Appearing via Zoom on a computer next to Becci was our other officiant, Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, who lives in Florida. Jen’s parents and Jen’s sister were “seated” in the gallery, appearing on Zoom from Michigan.
It was a short but lovely ceremony—but as we intended, this was simply the opening kickoff to the wedding year.
The ceremony transcript
Here’s an actual transcript of the ceremony:
Adrienne: Welcome to Round 1 of Scott and Jen’s Wedding Year.
Becci: You know why we’re here, so let’s get to it.
Becci: Scott, do you?
Scott: Yep.
Adrienne: Jen, do you?
Jen: Uh huh.
Becci: Cool, cool. Here, wear these.
[holds out hand with both rings in palm; Scott and Jen take their own ring and put it on their own finger]
Adrienne: Great, sign the papers to complete the First Round of the Wedding Year.
[Becci hands cheap clipboard to Scott to sign, who hands it to Jen to sign]
Becci: Congrats on graduating to Round 2. You may now cheers!
[The four of us grab beverages and hold it up to cheers]
And yes, that’s exactly what we did…to the shock of our parents.
We then moved along to a slightly longer ceremony. 😉
We intend on having two bigger parties (one in Michigan and one in Phoenix) but also have several small/smaller celebrations throughout the year. We intend to make each celebration especially meaningful to those who attend, including having individual ceremonies at the bigger events. So you don’t need to worry that you missed out on “the legal contract” portion.
And…we may have something else in store at the end of our Wedding Year!
