There's a book called "How to Plan a Practical Wedding." I got it when I got engaged and read it. Twice. I can tell you how to do the opposite, and mason jars are critical.
My fiance and I hoped for a small affair focused on family. We imagined 30-50 people. Simple. Good music, good food, people we love celebrating love.
But we're from Florida & Minnesota, and we live in Alaska. We decided to get married at my parent's house in Minnesota, in the "middle" for everyone, which really means "destination" for everyone, except my parents.
I got some magazines and looked up what it takes to plan a wedding. That's when I found out about the mason jars. You are not really throwing a wedding unless you craft something complicated out of mason jars, and spend a lot of money, time and frustration doing it. Your guests won't notice, but Martha Stewart would.
Along with the Mason jars, you need photos and videos and timelines and entrances and exits and "food stations" (surprisingly unrelated to the Flying J chain of highway fuel stops). You have to have a really expensive dress and really expensive cake and you should probably take ballroom dance lessons that you will probably never use again in Homer, Alaska.
When you realize you are bringing everyone to a destination wedding and you realize that a wedding really isn't about two people, it's about all the people that love them coming together and some kind of ridiculous amalgamation of all their wishes, you are easily drawn away from the small family affair into the land of the mason jars.
I started well. I borrowed a dress, dodging the "get an expensive dress you will wear once" advice. But I got convinced by the deluge of wedding advice that I needed it fitted. It is hard to find a wedding dress boutique within striking distance of rural Alaska. I found a dressmaker that worked out of her home. When I showed up for my appointment and went through the door, it was as if I had entered the set of "Hoarders." Boxes and piles leaned in towards me from every direction, most of them taller than my head. I carefully picked a path upstairs, the whole while followed by a black dog barking and snarling. I thought, "I really shouldn't leave this dress here." But my Minnesota Nice Genes didn't equip me to back out of an appointment. The woman, after she dug a tunnel to her sewing machine and had me try the dress on, told me I didn't need it altered. It was obviously too small on top and the bustle was broken. But she tried to convince me it was fine. I thought, "how do you make a living if you tell your customers they don't need your services?" She obviously hadn't read the Martha Stewart magazines-- every bride has umpteen dress fittings to fit the perfect gown just for her!
I asked her to at least fix the bustle. When I picked up the dress 3 weeks later, the bustle was more broken and the white gown was covered in black dog hair. Figures. I took it home, took out my great aunt's 1947 Singer, altered the dress and fixed the bustle myself.
My mom, meanwhile, is so wrapped up in wedding planning at Reception Ground Zero in Minnesota, that she is suggesting outlandish things like all the bridesmaids wearing wedding gowns and the us exiting to a full 4th of July Fireworks display. She has even hired wildlife videographers with Ducks Unlimited credentials. They are probably building blinds out of mason jars around the chapel to hide behind while they film.
Everything my fiance and I nix has just been turned into a "surprise!" Meanwhile, we are helpless in Alaska using a tweezers to pluck dog hair out of my borrowed wedding dress and figuring out how to get mason jar sculptures through TSA.
If we were in a regular town, these things would have normal solutions like dry cleaners and shipping franchises, but instead of buying wedding bands at a jewelry shop, which we don't have, we hiked raw gold up the bluff in the rain to deliver it to a neighbor who has a gold shop in his basement. He said if we want engraving, we can do it ourselves-- so even the end-of-the-roaders are reading Martha Stewart's DIY column.
We've almost made it through all the particulars and are even excited, or pretending to be, for the surprises that await us in Minnesota. After all, you should only do mason jar crafts-- and get married-- once.
