Jess & Sean's Irish-Jewish tradition-meets-offbeat wedding
Posted by Offbeat Intern · Real offbeat weddings

You've already gotten the full scoop on OBT member Jess' fabulous colored crinoline wedding dress, now get the entire scoop on the wedding itself!

The Offbeat Bride: Jess, Experiential Educator

Her Offbeat Partner: Sean, Organic Foods Data King

Location & date of wedding: Artists for Humanity, South Boston, MA — May 2, 2009

What made our wedding offbeat: I am a Jewish educator and my husband is of Irish descent and was raised in the Catholic Faith. We wanted to honor and celebrate our heritage, while at the same time express our free thinking personalities. We had a Jewish Lay Leader and a family friend who is a former Pastor co-officiate our service, which we wrote ourselves, but honored every tradition that we could.

Centerpiece and custom favor on the table.

We made and borrowed everything we could. I carved a rubber stamp of a picture of us that we used for our invitations and programs. We made non-floral centerpieces from 70s-style photo cubes. We borrowed candles from recently married friends. Our chuppah was decorated by friends and we hung laminated photos of loved ones from the poles. Other friends made our flowers, printed our invitations, and gifted our paper mache cake topper dolls that looked like us! I spent the last week making mini-art favors with pictures of each guest and quotes in Yiddish or Irish Sayings. People really responded to them.

My husband wore a custom fit 60's style suit, and I wore a custom dress made while I was visiting friends in Thailand, accented with colored crinoline by a friend.

For our guestbook we asked people to draw silly pictures of themselves with names on the back so we could guess their identities.

My husband is a musician and our friends from the Boston music scene performed throughout the night, it was amazing.

Our biggest challenge: We had to do a lot of work ourselves on our spiritual choices and direction for our future family before the wedding, and this was not always easy. We had some counseling with our officiant that we found very helpful. We also took trips to Ireland and Israel to further understand each other and these were amazing.

The "cake taking" colored crinoline. Le swoon.

Our other challenge was everything that we did D.I.Y. It was so much work, and we are perfectionists. It is important that people understand that D.I.Y. weddings take a huge amount of time and extra work, and it may be worth hiring others or finding another time to be creative than for this one day. At times, it was hard to stay focused on the meaning and purpose of what we were doing as opposed to worrying about how we applied the wrong glue to the surface of the favors.

My dress was challenging in that my designer is Thai and we had a language barrier. I had them send the dress as a skirt and top and had it fitted locally. This worked out great! The craftsmanship is gorgeous and someone could easily order a skirt from them and have it made into a dress in their home town. As I said above, it was a bit short, so I looked online for inspiration and a dear friend added beautiful funky crinoline to the skirt.

My favorite moment: We didn't know until the big day, but we both planned musical surprises for each other. I asked my husband's band mates to secretly play his favorite song, Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks, for our processional. It was a big suprise and such an emotional moment! He shed some big ole tears down the aisle and the music was beautiful.

Then, during the reception, my husband played a song that he had written for me with the help of the same friends (!) plus many more. My husband had said that he didn't want to play at his own wedding so this was a huge surprise! He pulled me out onto the dance floor and had his friends surround us while playing acoustic guitars. He also incorporated Hebrew words of love into the song lyrics that he had learned phonetically.

During the cocktail hour more friends played music, and at one point you could hear everyone singing the chorus to Reo Speedwagon's 'Keep on Loving You.' It was hilarous.

It was also amazing to do the hora, the traditional Jewish circle dance, with 200 of our family and friends. Everyone got into the spirit and Sean loved being lifted on the chairs! I think some of our friends will have a hora at their wedding even if they aren't Jewish!

Father of the bride.

My advice for other offbeat brides: It's not necessary to balk from all tradition, and there are ways to embrace religion and culture in a modern and open and celebratory way. When I see how happy our parents were and how elated they continue to be it feels that it was all worth it.

Take fun photos and do some on your own as a couple! We had an Incredible Hulk that one of the high school students had made left out at the last minute, and it was the hit of the party!

In order to accommodate as many people as we could, we invited local friends to join us later for dessert and dancing. This worked out great, and in retrospect we could have skipped dinner completely and done the entire event this way.

Since we had large numbers, I am happy we made the favors so that every person knew that we knew and appreciated their presence in our lives.

As others have said, everything doesn't need to be unique. This is about love and marriage and your future together! Although I'm thrilled with the result of all of our hard work, I wish we had had less to do so we could have spent more time with everyone.

Care to share a few vendor/shopping links?:

• Dress: Decha Mengthaisong. You can find him on Facebook or ask me. He doesn't have a website. Located in Chiang Mei, Thailand.
• Sean's Suit: Duchess Clothier, couldn't recommend more highly!
• Photos: Allison Evans
• Venue: Artists for Humanity Boston
• Registery: SmartHoneymoon.com (we registered for help with our honeymoon and for furniture through the same site. This worked out wonderfully)
• Caterer: Green Olive Co.
• Photocube Centerpieces: We ordered them through Target, but Urban Outfitters is carrying them as well.
• Shoes: Filene's Basement
• Dessert: Whole Foods Market (instead of one wedding cake, we had 20 beautiful cakes on a dessert buffet from Whole Foods. They were fabulous).
• Wedding Website: We used Nearlyweds.com before they were associated with OBB, and then were so happy when the two connected! Really easy to use and beautiful designs!
• Ketubah: Robert Maloney
• Caketoppers: Mudeye Puppets

Enough talk — show me the wedding porn!: