District Weddings

As promised, here is Suzanne’s perspective on her unique planning experience and how her fabulous taste led to her beautiful cherry blossom wedding…

Originally we wanted to have our wedding in the place where we met in highschool: Charlottesville, Virginia. We had also considered my grandmother’s birthplace Bermuda. The idea of a destination wedding was really appealing to us too. But we had no idea how far away our wedding would be!

We were engaged around New Year’s and by June we were living in Japan. I immediately fell in love with the Japanese subtropical island that would be our home for the next 3 years.

Very soon after we arrived, we learned that Brian would be deploying to Afghanistan sometime soon. I realized that I needed to start planning our Japanese wedding for sometime that year. Christmastime seemed to be the best time of year for people to take time off to travel half-way around the world for a week. So our wedding date was set for 6 months later: December 27, 2008.

The experience of planning a wedding in a foreign country, one in which I did not speak the language, was a very interesting, fun experience. Although at times challenging! My wedding planner, Nozomi, became a friend to me and helped me to learn more about the japanese culture. We met about every other week to go over things: flowers, food, music, photography. Everytime we met she would prepare herself with lots of images and some english words to describe them. I would do the same, and quickly learned the Japanese words for colors, types of fish, types of orchids, and much more. I also learned cultural things, like when to bow, how to bow, when to add san to the end of someone’s name.

Before moving to Japan I had envisioned a bouquet bursting with various shades of pink peony. However, the island had orchids everywhere and I knew it would be better to embrace what was native to the island. Cherry blossoms are sacred so I could not chop those down and put them on the table or in my bouquet.

We also embraced the food of the island and had more sushi at the reception than I have ever seen in my life! Getting the cakes to be somewhat western was a bit of a challenge. Japanese weddings cakes tend to be rather small and decorated with lots of fruit and decorations. I wanted something larger and more simple, perhaps with just some cascading ran (orchids). In the end, Nozomi helped to create something really perfect.

As for the jewelry, I designed a ‘Sakura‘ collection (japanese for ‘cherry blossom’) for the wedding. I made pave diamond cherry blossom earclips and rings for me and my mother to wear and crystal necklaces to go with the bridesmaids’ pink Marisa Baratelli ensemble. I had already picked out my dress at Vera Wang in New York before flying to Japan and decided I loved the enormous, white phalenopsis orchids so much that I would put them in my bouquet and in my hair. I really started to embrace our tropical wedding!

Later this week, we will learn more about the Cherry Blossom filled venue and see more of the stunning Sakura collection. Happy Tuesday!