Mia stole the show last time, so now you’re all stuck with me — Ethan.

This week we had our first serious sit down with one of our two officiants.  One is a close family friend of Mia’s who lives in Arizona, he’ll be representing… Well, I don’t know exactly, we haven’t worked out the details entirely, but he’ll be important in the non-Jewish aspects of the ceremony.  The other officiant is a cantor out here in Massachusetts who is a great, soulful, spiritual and all around fabulous woman. 

We met with her over Korean Bibimbap after work this week.  A lot of the discussion was background on our spiritual, personal and family histories so we could build a common language as a basis for the ceremony.  When we did start getting into specifics, I found it was important for me to have much of the basic Jewish liturgy included, while Mia wanted a variety of blessings and ceremonial touches from her diverse background.  (Did we mention that her people hail from over half a dozen European countries and the Western Hemisphere and has no overlap with my 4 European countries of decent?)

So we’re looking into unity candles, wine drinking/glass breaking, hand fasting, and native American wedding vases, among other things.  In thinking about all this though, we still want to keep the ceremony to a reasonable time.  Clearly there are going to have to be some compromises to keep it under 2 hours.  🙂  And that’s when it hit me!  Often when doing the Seven Blessings, you’ll have people read them in both Hebrew and English.  Sometimes it’s the same person, sometimes different.  But what if we do it differently?  We’re now looking into writing/stealing our own unique set of seven blessings.  Some of the traditional ones are sure to be there, but there will definitely be others as well.

We’ve still not really worked out the details of course, but at least we have a direction for some of this insanity.  And it’ll keep things moving if we do it right.  Winners all around.