You've been asked to officiate a wedding ceremony for the first time. Your first reaction? You feel honoured! Now that you're sitting down to actually figure it out, it's overwhelming. Maybe you feel pretty good in front of a crowd. But a wedding? It's all too much. I got you. There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to a wedding ceremony! The key is to understand the parts of a the ceremony itself. First, you need to know how to format a wedding ceremony script. But that's just the...
Category: Officiating Best Practices
How (And Why!) to End the Wedding Ceremony with a Grand Finale
The very best ending to a wedding ceremony is a grand finale. Everyone is on their feet. The officiant presents the couple. The music starts. The couple head up the aisle to a symphony of overjoyed laughter and raucous cheers from their guests! But that's not just going to happen on its own. There's a perfect formula for lining up the moving parts to ensure the wedding ceremony ends with a grand finale. The officiant needs to order things in a specific way to make it happen. And if you don't...
The 3 Times to Get Out of the Way in a Wedding Ceremony
There are three crucial moments when the wedding officiant needs to step aside in the wedding ceremony. As officiants, we're literally the centre of attention for almost the entire ceremony. I mean, there's no need to hog the spotlight the entire time! Hopefully, we keep our self-into in our opening comments down to a single sentence or two, and then our officiant speech is entirely about our couple. With our words, we're doing our best to deflect everyone's attention to who the whole day is...
What To Say at a COVID Wedding
You take your place at the front, turn to face the wedding guests, and... they're all wearing masks. They're spaced 6 feet apart. The room is half empty. You can't make out any smiles. You can't pick up on the excitement in the room. The only sign of life you can see is pairs of open, expressionless eyes. You clear your throat and get ready to speak. There are two ways this can go. Say Nothing So It Seems Normal? Conventional wisdom goes like this: "When something is socially uncomfortable,...
8 Steps for a Simple and Meaningful Wedding Ring Exchange
Just about every contemporary wedding ceremony has a part where the couple exchanges wedding rings. This has been going on literally for ages - the earliest wedding ring exchanges were happening in Egypt over 3000 years ago when couples would exchange rings made of hemp or reeds, and then other cultures improved on that with rings of iron and then previous metals. Because the ring-exchange element of the wedding ceremony has been going on for thousands of years across all sorts of religions...
How to Read the Wedding Ceremony Script (Without Being Glued to the Page)
I get asked at least once a week: How much of the wedding ceremony script can I read? Is it even okay to read it at all? How much of the script do I have to memorize? I love being the bearer of good news, so here it is: You can read absolutely all of the wedding ceremony script word-for-word. As wedding officiants, we're not Tony Robbins. We're not motivational speakers. We don't need to stalk the stage up and down and pace back and forth. Nobody expects that or wants that from us. We need to...
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