Oopsy

It's not much of a secret that I put in an unfathomable number of hours working on my wedding.  If there was a project to be done, I found it and did it.  I've thought about putting together an inventory of all the things I made, but then I feared that I would actually be embarrassed by how much time/effort I put into one day if I put it all down on paper.  I still might do it, just for posterity's sake.  

From the arrival of the first guests to the footsteps of the most champagne-inebriated of my friends dragging themselves up the highway to the after-party at a friend's nearby home, our wedding was about 7 hours long.  As these things go, that's pretty long, but even still, as all newlyweds seem to say, the day really did fly by.  Since much of it was a blur, you might think that I would regret some of the smaller details that I never even saw on the wedding day.  Honestly, though, there are very few, if any, things that I regret about the preparations for my wedding day.  

This is not to say that I don't admit some, er, mistakes.  For example, there are apparently some differences between wedding sparklers and the sparklers that you buy at your average 4th of July fireworks stand.  The #1 difference?

SMOKE!

Photography by Betsy Limbaugh

Our "exit" (quotation marks because it was staged...we were absolutely not ready to leave!) evoked more than a little coughing, maybe some hacking, even.  In all the blog entries that I saw for all the weddings with sparkler exits, there was never mention of a substantive difference between sparklers.  Even the online vendors of wedding sparklers never obviously mentioned this detail.  Sure, most of the wedding ones looked longer, but to be honest, I didn't really want to pass through a gauntlet of 36" fire-wielding sticks. I just thought it was another ploy by the wedding industry to charge luxury prices for an everyman good.  And I, sir, would have none of that!  (Note:  If I ever go into the wedding sparkler business, you better believe that I'd put a big, bold note saying, "Hey, you are paying a premium here because these do indeed fulfill a need that Bubba's State Line Firework's can't fulfill!")

Which leads me to difference #2: PRICE.  Cost for 200 sparklers from a fireworks tent the day after the 4th of July: <$10.  The price of 200 "wedding" sparklers: ~$45.  

But you know, in the end, I don't really regret it.  It saved me $35 (which I guess in the grand scheme of things, is arguably insignificant), and it was pretty freakin' hilarious.  I actually really like the photos of it, because we basically look like bad ass action heroes.  "Yeah, we just got married, but I guess we could spare a few moments to, I don't know, save some people from a burning building.  No big deal."