Rebels' Guide

Some blog posts about awesome weddings I’ve been lucky enough to attend just write them selves. Lee and Courtney’s wedding does Hey Josh! Lee and I just want to send you a MMMAAAASSSSIIIVVVEEE thank you for being such a special part of our magical day! You were nothing short of amazing! Both of us were nervous about the ceremony. Now, looking back, it was one of the biggest highlights of the day and we will never forget it. Your ability to make such a delicate moment fun and enjoyable yet maintain the appropriate level of “special” is nothing short of incredible. It’s reflective of how super cool of a human being you are! So thank you! And then to add some perspective in there, here’s what Sunlit Studios had to say (they were Lee and Courtney’s wedding photographers ) We love how they interacted during the ceremony – they weren’t afraid to cuddle, hug or even kiss! We love it when a couple does ...

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt got married in a small chapel in a private ceremony attended by family and friends at Chateau Miraval today! In advance of the nondenominational civil ceremony, Pitt and Jolie obtained a marriage license from a local California judge. The judge also conducted the ceremony in France. Lucky boy! Angelina walked down the aisle with her eldest sons Maddox and Pax. Zahara and Vivienne threw flower petals. Shiloh and Knox served as ring bearers. I made this new poster just for them!

I had coffee with Connie Penhallurick from Relationships4Life today to talk about pre-marriage education and it was nowhere near as scary as you’d imagine! Pre-marriage education is nothing like Robin Williams dished out in License to Wed , but most people think it’s weird, scary or for people in big trouble, so I asked connie a bunch of questions. Introduce yourself Connie, who are you? I have several hats, I’m a wife and a mother to two little girls and most recently I’ve started my own business, Relationships4Life, and it’s a relationship building service. I’m from a little town called Yeppoon, I met my husband in Townsville which is where I got my qualifications and experience as a psychologist. For the past ten years I’ve been working in the counselling industry and out of that comes my interest is in working with couples. Is everyone that comes to you “broken”? Many people come to me with personal barriers or difficulties and ...

Sometimes at the start of a blog post about someone else’s wedding I’ll talk about how awesome they are and all that jazz. This blog requires none of that. I will give a quick shoutout to my friends at The Landing at Dockside for just being there all venuey like, Nic and Jewls at  Stem Designs for being my go-to kickass wedding flower people, and also to KCL photography for being all over these pics like a wet rag. Over to Mel and Chris, The Megaws: From the get go, Chris and I never really wanted a wedding in the “traditional” sense. Neither of us is religious and we both have a significant distain for weddings that drone on and drag out.   The very first thing we decided on when we were planning our big day was to make sure we had a celebrant who “got us”. Not someone who was going to get up and read a piece of legislation and then wax lyrical about marriage and all it entails, but someone who understood who we were as individua...

Terrible weddings have a few things in common and if you’re planning your own wedding, it’s worth “ dialling before you dig ” so you yourself don’t have a shit wedding. 1) Shit weddings are often mum’s second wedding It’s lovely that mum has an opinion, and you should honour and respect her and her opinion. But it’s not her wedding. The mum in this story can be anyone who really feels that need to tell you how to celebrate your marriage you’re about to begin with that person you love. 2) A shit wedding holds true to tradition but not to the people Traditions are lovely, but not necessary. If the wedding looks more like a hollywood church wedding than your last party then there’s something wrong. 3) A shit wedding has a price/value inequity A good wedding isn’t expensive, or cheap. A shit wedding isn’t cheap or expensive. It’s not about price. It’s about value. At the very core of a wedding is the imparta...

There’s a new wedding blog which is pretty cool, it’s called “F Yeah Gay Weddings” and you can visit it right now at  fyeahgayweddings.com . The site’s editor, Ms. Luz-Vegas, and I have been chatting about me writing something for the blog, because after all, the ceremony is at the very core of a wedding, gay or not. I’ve got a problem though. I’m torn between two thoughts. One is that a gay wedding is, or should be, exactly completely the same as a straight wedding, except for the whole guy-guy or girl-girl thing, which is merely semantics. Yes there’s all of that hate and hurt that a section of our community has continually heaped onto the gay community, but push that aside for a moment and it’s just two kids in love and their village celebrating with them. The other thought is that gay weddings change everything. You see the problem with straight weddings is that they come with hundreds, thousands, of years of tradition, meaning, ...

Kat and Dan were two of the loveliest people and they inited me into their State Library of Queensland Red Box of love and emotion for their late afternoon wedding! We had an awesome day and you were wonderful. Thank you so much for everything. I genuinely have no feedback to give you except that our ceremony was everything we could have wanted. It was intimate, special and such a happy day for us. Shane Shepherd was on camera at the State Library of Queensland as well!  

As the sun stepped aside for thunder clouds to fill the sky on a Friday afternoon nothing was going to rain on Natasha and Gavin’s wedding parade. In the end we all got a bit wet, but we also had a ball, celebrations were had and clothes dried off! We made the decision to just soldier-on in the face of rain and cloud and it all worked out in the end! Natasha and Gavin sent me such a lovely letter after the wedding that I had to share it, and their photos by Aaron Shum Photography below! Hi Josh! Just wanted to pass on a big thank you for being a part of our day. You were a ray of sunshine on a very cloudy, rainy, stormy day! So many of our friends and family have commented on how great you were. Truth be told, I don’t think many of them had seen a ceremony quite like ours, which is exactly what we wanted. Your originality, friendliness, warmth and style was what we were drawn to initially and you certainly delivered. I was told that you were fantastic with wa...

I was lucky enough to chat to the lovely girls at White Magazine for their latest issue, so check it out! Get issue 25 from your newsagent , online , or have a read below.

You can choose any, all, or none of the wedding traditions you see in movies, TV, or popular culture. I’m not your boss and I won’t tell you what traditions to adhere to or which ones to drop. But when we meet up to plan your ceremony I will ask you why. Why, why, why! Here’s my understanding of some of the wedding traditions I come across too often. Having a bridal party Bridal parties were introduced to confuse demons. If you’re worried about demons you’ve defs gotta have a bridal party. Watch me introduce the concept to Lisa Wilkinson and Karl Stefanovic on the Today Show. Standing on a particular side The “which side does the bride and groom stand on” debate began when grooms would often kidnap their brides and need to defend the wedding ceremony with their sword which they would need to swing with their sword hand, their right hand, and protect/hold/continue to kidnap their bride with their left hand. The best man The best man’s firs...

This blog post first appeared on Polka Dot Bride , and now I’m republishing it on my own blog. Ms Gingham said it was “the best guide ever to writing your wedding vows”, so enjoy! In my profession as a marriage celebrant, my daily struggle is wedding vows. Not my own, thankfully. But in helping people with their vows. Some people want to write their own vows but then they go home and just Google someone else’s and use them, and then some are so scared of the thought of saying vows let alone writing them. So I wanted to tell everyone else what I tell the scared non-wedding-vowers. Defining vows First of all, so we’re all on the same page, a vow is a statement you make, not a question you answer. So anything involving ‘I do’ or ‘I will’ is not a vow, it’s an asking or a question. vow. noun. A solemn promise. Secondly , your vow is for one person and one person only, the bride or groom standing across from you. It’s ok for everyone else to listen, to laugh, or to cry, ...

You don’t have to memorise your vows, so don’t. Don’t memorise your vows 🙂 No more!   Related notes on the subject: No-one is expecting you to remember your vows Less than 1% of the grooms and brides married in Australia last year memorised their own vows We have the technology (paper/print/tablets/phones) to read vows at your wedding Your celebrant can have the vows and either pass them to you, or ask you to repeat after them, whatever makes you feel the best You’re allowed to “wing it” with most of your vows, there’s just a few bits that need to be exact – more info Seriously, you don’t have to memorise your vows and unless you have superpowers then don’t do it If you do however have superpowers it’d be really cool to meet up, please email me Here’s a pretty cool guide I wrote on how to write your own vows that rock, it’s the best guide ever apparently!

I don’t like to kiss and tell, but I will. I sat down with a couple this week, a really lovely couple who are awesome and I love (just in case they are reading this hehe), and we were meeting to plan their wedding ceremony. The groom had been on this little website called Google and found some things that he didn’t like, but wanted to start from, so we were going to edit them and make something of it. Then I opened my big mouth with an analogy that didn’t totally make sense, but still delivered the message. If you’re going to create a chocolate cake, do you start with a piece of poo then try and make it taste like a chocolate cake?  A great cake comes from raw, original, sweet ingredients This is going to be a short blog post, because there’s not much more to say than this: most terrible, awkward and weird things happen at weddings because people feel they need to start with the traditional wedding script and edit it. But you don...