As of today I have been married for FIVE YEARS! That doesn’t seem long considering we started dating 10 years ago. I usually spend our anniversary reading our wedding ceremony and flipping through pictures. The best part of the wedding (I mean, aside from getting married) was our ceremony. We are Unitarians and had it pretty free and easy with the ceremony structure. It was really a FUN day because it was what we wanted. So for today’s Friday Five, in no particular order, here are my five favorite memories from September 25, 2010.

{The Ceremony} Like I mentioned, we wrote our own ceremony and I truly love each aspect of it. We mixed in a few different traditions from different cultures like stomping the glass and a wine ceremony. We spent a lot of time talking about our reading and how to pull everything that was special to us into a quick ceremony.

{My Girls} I decided I didn’t want to be Bridezilla – it wasn’t my style, so I didn’t want any bridemaid drama either. Lucky for me my three closest girl friends were of the ‘drama free’ mentality too. My Maid of Honor was my sister-in-law and best friend who tells it like it is. My cousin and best friend from growing up were my bridesmaids who were equally fun and organized. They really made the process not only hilarious, but relatively stress free from start to finish.

{Yichud} When you tell people about your upcoming wedding they tend to mention not eating. Well I like to eat and we paid a lot of money for the amazing food (pasta and fajita bar) so I was going to eat. I also wanted to spend some solo time with my new husband. Enter the tradition of the Yichud. The term “yichud” also refers to a ritual during an Ashkenazi Jewish wedding in which the newly married couple spends a period secluded in a room by themselves. We are not orthodox, but liked the idea of 15 minutes alone. Since we got married in an opera house, we used a dressing room. We had a plate of food and let our amazing photographer, Laura Dye, in to snap a few candids and then we just talked about random stuff. We hadn’t seen each other in a few days and just had this huge life altering event. This might be my favorite memory of the day.

{The Candy Bar} So this wedding fad of having a candy bar for guests? I was 110% in. Since the vibe of the wedding was ‘vintage’ my sainted Mother scoured the internet for throwback candy.  It looked AWESOME and it was a hit as a thank you for our guests.

{My Brother} I have one brother who thought it was a good idea to follow in my dad’s footsteps and be a Seabee in the Navy. The Navy tends to dictate every bit of a military family’s life – even the extended family. My brother was in training and flew in at some ungodly hour the day of my wedding and flew out at some ungodly hour the morning after. Having him there meant so much to me, I couldn’t imagine him not standing up there.