As long as we both shall live

The Disneyfication of my wedding started out small, in fact we tried excruciatingly hard in the beginning to keep all things Disney separate from our wedding weekend. Like I said, it started out small, with this cake topper we discussed earlier this week.

A quick aside: I had to order another cake topper yesterday after my fiancée decapitated Mickey. I am hoping it arrives tomorrow, as I paid half a fortune to have it shipped 2 day air, in time to save the cake. I told her that if my love of all things Disney was that much of a stressor on her she could have talked to me, not knocked Mickey’s block off.

The next piece of the Disney puzzle fell into place when we decide on California for our honeymoon. We reached the agreement that allowed me two and a half days in the house that Walt built before driving up the coast and spending a few days in Sonoma County. It was shortly after this that we decided to register our honeymoon, as our apartment is too small for the possessions we already have, and there was no way that we needed more “stuff.” This leads to step three.

I have been to quite a number of weddings in the past year, it is that vicious cycle I guess, in two years it will be all babies, and the one thing I never understood was the generic numbering of the tables at the reception. I was bound and determined to come up with a clever way to name the tables we were using. We went through naming them after types of apples that are harvested in the fall, autumn vegetables, and even tree names that have leaves that change color. It was then that I realized that, since we had registered our honeymoon, and not for anything else, why not name the tables after attractions in Disneyland? I picked out around fifteen attractions, found good pictures of the attractions, placed them on either side of a tri-fold picture frame, and printed the name in large fonts in the middle of frames. Perfect, table names set!

It seems amazing looking back now, but these events seemed to fall one after the other, the next wave of Disney intrusion crashing over the wedding just as the last was fading from memory. But sure enough, no sooner had we decided on table names than my cousin and fiancée came up with the brilliant idea of engraving a Hidden Mickey inside of my wedding band.

Then, as I began to put together the playlists for the reception, all of the reception music is coming to the guests live from my iPod so that I could control what played when and which artists and versions of songs we listened to. I decided that I love the old 20s – 40s juke joint type music, pulled together a list of songs from The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and Sunset Blvd. in Disney-MGM Studios, and used them to cover the entire set of music needed for the cocktail hour.

About this time it began to seem that the Disneyfication was running out of steam, and would not turn another corner. Except that it was also around this time that my fiancée thought we should have a tagline for our wedding. You’ve seen these, the weddings that say things like Dave and Julia: Wedding of the Century or Mark and Lisa: Our Eternal Love. It is apparently hip and cool, of which I am neither, to have one of these. Immediately following her proclamation, I returned fire with “The Happiest Wedding On Earth.” She told me flat out that it was never going to happen, unfortunately for her, over the next week she could not come up with anything better and resigned herself to the fact that we were, indeed, having The Happiest Wedding On Earth.

And that is where the Disneyfication of my wedding weekend, which starts in just about two days, ends. It was a long and sordid road, but in the end I think it speaks volumes about who I truly am at my core. Trust me though; there is enough of her in the decorations and other pieces of the wedding that this is not a Disney exclusive event. And no matter what, the truly important piece of this weekend is the journey that we are beginning together, and I couldn’t be more excited about that. I feel if you were to roll every Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and birthday I have ever had into one day you still wouldn’t come close to the joy and magic I will feel on this Saturday, October 27th, my wedding day.

Okay, I think she probably stopped reading there. I may have left out one last little detail I neglected to mention. I had asked that anyone giving a speech, i.e. the best man, parents, my fiancée, our siblings, and myself, try to keep the easy punches and jokes at our expenses to a minimum. After all, we are celebrating our love, not attending a roast. But, being the kind of guy I am, I had to make an exception. As stated above, all of the music for our reception is coming straight from my iPod, and my fiancée got to approve every tracklisting. I “accidentally” forgot to write down that I had the Disneyland Band playing the Mickey Mouse March as the introduction to my speech. But, I had to show her that I could laugh at myself, and what better way than to put my love of Disney right out there in the open for all to see.