After waiting 16 years to be allowed to legally married, Lita and Carol were ready for one hell of a celebration! They wanted to use their wedding to celebrate them, but also love – in all forms.
“We waited so long to be allowed to legally marry!” began the girls. “So we were so excited to finally be able to do it. We love the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland, and wanted a wedding at dawn on the beach. However our professionals and others were held up because of Hurricane Bertha, so we started in the afternoon rather than the morning, and compressed a full days worth of activities into half a day.”
“We wanted a beautiful rainy weather option for our ceremony which is why we hired the tipis from Highland Tipis, we ended up having the ceremony in them so we’re glad we did! They were very good and ensured that we were safe from the gusting winds.”
“In terms of décor, we had hand painted lots of jars and bottles and put these around with candles and flowers in”, they continued. “We had lots of rustic candle holders dotted around, as well as second-hand saris weaving around the tipi walls. We wanted to recreate an authentic ‘love is happening’ feel to both tipis. We are both nearly 60 years old and so we wanted to share the ‘all you need is love’ experience of the 60s and 70s with our guests, some of whom, were too young to have been there first time around!”
The girls looked beautifully colourful for their special day, and both wore two amazing outfits each! “We both wore hand made feather mohawks (one rainbow, one peacock) as a symbol of our pride in and celebration of the lesbian, gay, queer, intersex alliance rainbow, and in memory of a recently deceased friend (Gill) who always wore rainbow clothes”, they continued. “They also signified the anti apartheid rainbow alliance, and other similar progressive bridge building movements, which we wanted to pay homage too due to their triumph of hope and love over hate.”
There was one other thing very prevalent in this wedding – dancing! “We wanted the gathering to be about living life in the moment, experiencing the joy and delight of giving yourself over to that moment of playing and having fun together. We particularly loved our friends and family offering to play music for us. Laura played fiddle for the wedding circle dance that we had after the ceremony. This is a traditional Jewish wedding dance where all guests dance in a circle around the couple showering good blessings. Laura also made up and sang a wedding song for us. Dan and Meriam played guitar for our ring warming song.”
“The only thing that didn’t really work out for our wedding was the beach ceremony because of the weather”, they said. “However we did go to the beach at 6am, as initially planned, and some family and friends came too. We lit a candle, drew a heart in the sand, drank some fizz and played the Bodhran quietly.”
“Because we are two women, soon to be 60, who have waited all our adult lives to be allowed by the country and culture we grew up in to marry the person we love, we were absolutely aware that we were sharing a unique occasion and gift with our families and friends”, they concluded. “Therefore we wanted to express not only our pride in and respect for our identity and community, but also our love and trust of those who came to witness the blessing of our marriage. We believe that each and every wedding ceremony and day is an opportunity for couples to share their deepest sense of who they are as a couple, their deepest feelings of trust and deepest connectedness with their guests. Not just on that one day, but for each and every day, so people have this to take away with them back into their worlds. We wanted to express and share these experiences in our wedding guests day and we think we did just that.”
