Wedding?

Weddings used to be when a couple decided to marry and maybe have someone "stand up for them" such as a friend or relative of each. My mother was married in the nineteen thirties and she wore a blue bias cut silk dress and carried some long stemmed lilies. From the garden. My dad's brother and his wife Blanche smiled alongside them as they stood beside their boxy black Ford honeymoon sedan. Neither had a job and they were eloping because my mother's father, even though she was twenty-one years old, didn't want her to marry a man who hadn't a job. There was a shot gun involved later when he went to claim back his daughter from the inlaw's home where they were to reside for awhile. Only the fast talking mother-in-law saved the day, when she, Mary, told John, my grandfather to be, that the couple was married and that it was too late for a shotgun. The rift was mended when I came along  a year later. My dad had found work. It was the Dirty Thirties. Today I read the on-line magazine that makes me howl at their calculation of the "average" cost of a wedding: thirty thousand dollars. What? That amount would make a nice downpayment on a studio condo where I live or maybe buy a pretty good car. Some families live on that amount for a year! Not well, but they somehow survive. Most of the weddings I hear about these days are after the couple has been together for a number of years, perhaps even buying a domicile together, and often, having had children. Then the wedding takes place and it is more a confirmation of their determination to stay together as a family or simply have for their friends and relatives, just a darn good party. Things do change in a hundred years! What disturbs me is not the latter kind of event but more the celebrity ones where the indulgences rise far above what seems moral or even normal. Or perhaps I am jaded. I still want to attend a wedding where The Dress and Tux don't cost half  the rest of the celebration and the guest list is made up entirely of people who love the couple and the whole event isn't put on for show but for happiness of the true kind. I fail to see in celebrity weddings why there are hundreds of attendees who probably only know of the couple and are there for the food, the dancing and the fashion show. This peculiar magazine that represents homage solely to the goddess of overindulgence, also pictures the up to five dresses the bride wears during the wedding plethora of designer label bragging and the cost of these wear-it-once gowns. There are before, during, feasting and dancing bride outfits as well as the honeymoon do dah clothes. In fact, since the weddings are held anywhere to brag about in the world, everyone is already on the honeymoon, too,  in their designer togs.  It seems that weddings of this kind are surpassing top designer fashion shows much as The Globe and Oscar events are with pruned down stars as their models. Getting back down to earth weddings, even the smallest ones of our ilk here on my part of the planet, are also kind of ridiculous and expensive. Some take years to pay off. The ones I love are the garden weddings behind someone's house with a table of goodies to nibble on and a toast or two to the bride without the dancing and rude roasting and everyone goes home to ponder the lovely couple and their union. My favorite ones, too, are those where the pair goes off alone and makes their vows in whatever way works for them because they want a promised life together immersed in what really counts over everything else. Love.