Seven Years Ago

Seven years ago today I married the love of my life, Christopher Paul Burris. I love him just as much now as I did on our wedding day, if not more. He makes me smile when I’m blue, giggle when I need a laugh, and just makes me happy when he’s near.

Looking back at our wedding we had a real fairy tale wedding, and I don’t mean that lightly either. Right after we got engaged Chris told me that the wedding was in my hands and he’d take care of the honeymoon. Since we’d be paying for both ourselves, he told me that I should have the wedding I always dreamed about. I took his advice and decided that we would get married at a Renaissance festival.

Why a renaissance festival? When I was about 12 or so I came across a painting by Edmund Blair Leighton, entitled My Fair Lady. The painting was of a renaissance bride. At the time I was already big in renaissance/medieval genre, and enjoyed going to the local renaissance fair. When I saw this painting though, I knew in an instant that was what I wanted my wedding to look and feel like. I wanted a princess wedding, but an authentic one.

At first I thought it would be impossible to achieve the wedding I wanted, either it be ultra cheesy or super expensive. However, I decided to do some research and discovered that the Texas Renaissance Festival near Houston, Texas had an amazing wedding package for only $3000, this also included live music, carriage ride, sword of arches and food for fifty people. The wedding would be held outside in an amazing garden chapel, and compared to other places the package was a real deal.

With the wedding planned it was time to get the wedding clothes, and no ordinary clothes would do after all this was a renaissance wedding. My mother-in-law, Miss Linda, being an excellent seamstress volunteered to sew many of the clothes, including my beautiful gown and my prince’s suit.

She also worked on the groomsmen attire, the flower girl and ring bares costumes. Somewhere in the six month time we gave her, she also made a lovely gown for herself and my late father-in-law.

My mother searched the Internet for the perfect bridesmaids dresses for my sisters. I told her they didn’t need to be the same, since in olden days the wedding party wore only the best clothes they had available. She managed to find the cutest dresses one in a different color for each of my three sisters.

My parents also got dressed up, my dad wore a musketeers type attire, while my mom bought a lovely satiny blue dress. My brother, didn’t really want to participate, so I bought him a t-shirt, that says “I’m really excited to be here”.

The bride and bridemaids bouquets I bought on sale at Hobby Lobby. I know your thinking, fake flowers at a wedding. But the fall flowers were prefect, cheap, and I still have them in a vase. The festival package included hair flowers which I got for the bridesmaids. Only one of my sister’s like the whole renaissance theme, so the others gave their hair flowers to me after the wedding, I have those by the vase of flowers.

The wedding itself was kind of a blur, and I didn’t even know we had for example a violinist until we got the pictures back. Speaking of pictures, I think they tell the story better than I can.

I must truly be blessed, not only did I manage to get the wedding I dreamed of half my life, I also got to marry my best friend and true love.

After getting back from our honeymoon and getting the raw photos digitally from our photographer,I put together this amazing wedding poster, enjoy.