The Merry Month of May – Let Color Riot at Your Perfect Wedding

“It’s May, it’s May, the merry month of May.” There are a lot of metaphors for the month of May and most of them highlight the explosion of color, scent and romance. If you’re getting married, why not use those images to enrich your wedding ceremony, your reception and marriage? The Earth would like to encourage you in your pursuit of love.

My father once remarked when his 80 year old neighbor down the street fell in love Horace said: “Sam, it’s as sweet as it was when we fell in love for the first time. You feel just as young and just as joyous.” That’s what love can do for us. So why not let it work for you and your beloved? Keep your first love feeling going!

• Wedding Planning: this isn’t any old spring. This is the spring that you’re getting married. The world is bursting with song and flowers. Get out and enjoy it. Nurture your relationship as you plan your wedding. Take time off from the wedding planning and stroll in parks and fields. Keep reminding yourself of how wonderful love feels. This is such a magical time, and we often miss it because we’re taking care of details. The more effort you devote to creating a romantic relationship, the bigger the pay off – at your wedding ceremony and forever after.
• Wedding Bouquet and flowers: Rather than something monochromatic and demure, let colors riot, even if they’re pastels! Traditionally, in Western Europe, people wove tiny baskets and offered one another Lilies of the Valley on the first of May. They signify happiness. While they are a demure white, their leaves are a dark and glossy green and their scent is anything but delicate. It explodes on the senses. You don’t have to have roses or exotic hothouse flowers at your wedding. You can have garden flowers to carry you through!
• Wedding scents: Now scents are difficult. People are allergic. So you need to be really carefully with flowers that have a big scent unless you’re outside! But don’t hesitate to use real scents to enrich the experience.
• Wedding Ceremony: Use the metaphors of May: violets rampaging across a lawn in a burst of color, the euphoric singing of the birds. The overwhelming joy you have in your beloved. (Keep practicing, this is a talent you want to perfect!) As your guests to be joyous with you. Do the work you need to do beforehand so that when you show up at your wedding, you’re not exhausted and holding on, but rather glowing with the joy that you are marrying the partner of your dreams.
• Wedding Vows: Why not honor all the seasons in your vows. We know that steadfastness is important. The winter offers that as a metaphor. But that delicate feeling of joy and ecstasy are worth dedicating your life to maintaining. If you want a family, now’s the season to mention it! Passion is this season’s byword!
• Wedding Reception: Put flowers on the tables. Fill vases with flowering branches. Use centerpieces of fresh-smelling grass. Scatter brightly colored sugar eggs around the table or offer them as a favor. (You do remember that colored eggs came about as an effort to remind the birds what their responsibilities were? People colored them and placed them in the furrows of fields so that birds could find them.) Make a colored egg-tree. It’s been co-opted into Easter, but it doesn’t really belong there.
• Wedding Food: Serve a salad of fresh greens with a soft- or hard-boiled egg in celebration of the bounty of spring. Let where you are and what is growing dictate your menu. Decorate your cake with candied violets. Infuse it with delicate scents and tastes.
• Make your wedding dance a maypole dance! Now you tell me what you think this dance of a long pole with ribbons winding and unwinding around it was supposed to represent! Have your attendants dance in an outer circle while you dance in an inner one. Use country dances and country songs. Enjoy the beauties of the outside, even if that means you’re inside looking out at the beautiful silver rain that will make the gardens bloom.

Here’s the thing: May has metaphor after metaphor on which you can build your wedding. And because May comes every year, every year those metaphors will stir your hearts to the joy you felt on the day you married. Let the earth help you have the marriage you want.