Our Programs

We are having a Catholic ceremony with Ukrainian traditions woven in which means that our ceremony will be a lovely mix of traditional elements from our respective cultures. However, there are few guests which will be familiar enough to participate in all aspects of our ceremony without guidance. And we want everyone to be able to participate as much as they can in our ceremony. After all, the reason we've invited these people is so that they can celebrate with us in the beginning of our lives together and what better way for them to do it than to be an active and knowledgeable participant in our ceremony.

But how do we convey what is admittedly a large amount of information to every single one of our guests (we are expecting our guest turn out to be quite large)? For the answer to this question we took a cue from my parents.

My parents also had a traditional Catholic Wedding Mass, very similar to ours though you would replace the Ukrainian elements with a Unity Candle ceremony. However, they were inviting many guests who were either not practicing Catholic, or not Catholic at all. How best to make these types of guests feel comfortable in a religious setting where there are specific traditions and rituals woven into every aspect of the mass? My parents answer was a DIY project that is all the evidence you could need of how much my parents cared about each and every one of their guests.

Their program.

My officiant, who was also their officiant, saved some of my parent's wedding programs as the example of a "perfect has everything you could need" program. It is essentially a mass script so that each person knows exactly what to expect, what to respond, and when to respond. It's more than most people put in their programs, but for them it allowed all their guests to feel they were a part of the wedding proceedings. And that's exactly what Mishka and I want for our guests as well.

So, as we've been pulling together our ceremony, I've also been pulling together a mass script. A script we will at some point transform into our super long wedding program. And even better? We're going to translate it into Ukrainian for our guests who are not extremely comfortable with English. It's going to take a lot of time and a lot of love, but hopefully it will be worthwhile to our guests.

Also it will be great to look back on what is essentially a full script of our story and remember every word that was spoken :). I think that will make Mishka and I very happy in our years together.