Special touches bring even more meaning to the big day
By Toby Klein Greenwald, Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer, January 2010

Every family wants the wedding of their child or sibling to be memorable, a wedding that relatives and friends will talk about for years to come.

Most couples seek special touches that will bring not just panache and style to the occasion, but “added value” content that relates to the core of the event – the hopefully lifelong, loving and spiritual relationship of the bride and groom.
Here are some examples:

• “Recipes for a Happy Life” blank notebooks on the dinner table, to be filled in by the guests. In addition to providing a wonderful ice-breaker for the guests, who inevitably will read and compare each others’ suggestions and share laughs and stories, it is an incredible gift for the young couple, who will have great fun reading and using the booklets in the years to come.

The outside can be decorated with the couple’s wedding monogram, a photo of the couple, a reproduction of a wedding painting, or with a modern day caricature or cartoon.

The advice can be both literal and metaphoric, ranging from favorite challah recipes, or “Drinks for a Romantic Evening” to meaningful marital advice, such as: “Always be yourselves.” “Don’t mind-read.” “Find time for each other but find your private corner.”
Don’t forget to indicate on the front that the notebooks are for the couple, and have a family member collect them before the evening is over.

• The bride’s prayer. These are available in pretty white and gold folders at Jewish bookstores, but they are unique when they are created by the bride’s friends, personalized for her. This is the prayer that the bride says after the groom has lowered her veil over her face (the bedekin) and before she has joined him under the chupah (wedding canopy), but it is a beautiful prayer for the bride to say at any time during her wedding day.

It can be written in calligraphy or modern fonts and decorated with ribbons, beads or dried flowers. I saw one that was written artistically on a piece of driftwood.

• Adorn the chupah with something personal. For one of our daughters, we draped the front of the chupah with the silk and gold wedding sari that my father brought back for my mother from India after World War II, and on her bride’s chair was draped material that was a gift from a neighbor who had been helped by the groom in her recovery from substance abuse. Some families create their own chupot and pass them from child to child and from one generation to the next.

• Have a theme that is close to the heart of the couple, and follow it through on the tables. If the bride and groom love to travel, there can be reminders of places they have been or hope to go. If the theme is Israeli, the centerpieces can reflect this with cacti plants, seashells, wildflowers surrounded by pebbles, or small replicas of Jerusalem stone.

At the wedding of one of our daughters four years ago, her in-laws – farmers in Gush Katif at the time – placed geranium plants from their own greenhouses in the center of each table.

• If you have adult children, give them a role in the ceremony. I remember a friend’s wedding at which the bride’s six brothers, all with magnificent voices of chazanut (cantorial) quality, serenaded her as she walked down the aisle with her parents.

• Invite the guests to join you in song during the chupah ceremony. It happened spontaneously at the wedding of one of our daughters when the ketubah (marriage contract) had to be retrieved from the corner of the dining hall where the groom’s pre-nuptial tish (gathering) had been held. The rabbi began to sing softly. Soon we noticed 400 guests singing along with him.

• Invite loved ones who have passed away to “join” you under the chupah. This is an old Chasidic custom.

• The couple bless their friends. This is a new Israeli custom at modern religious weddings. During a break in the dancing, the close friends of the bride and groom line up and receive blessings: for their bashert, for health, for whatever they seek in their heart.

For on the happiest day of the couple’s life, blessings are meant to be shared.