The Wedding Part IV

 My bouquet was wrapped in a cut-off piece of the silk georgette used to make my wedding dress.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I love flowers and half seriously joke about wanting to be a florist. In the few days leading up to the wedding, I scoured Haifa for a florist that would understand what I wanted. What I absolutely didn't want was roses. NONE! It's not that I don't like roses. But I wanted to use wild flowers or flowers that you wouldn't usually see at a wedding. Mid-winter isn't exactly the best season for things in bloom, but I didn't want to settle. So I didn't. And then I got super lucky. 

 There is a little flower stand in the centre of Haifa which i would have walked by almost every day while I was living there. An Israeli woman called Rebecca who speaks limited English works there. Seeing as though it is literally just a stand, I initally didn't hope to find my wedding flowers, including my bouquet, there. But after not much luck elsewhere around town, I stopped by and told her my situation: A wedding in a few days, NO ROSES, wild flowers, SIMPLE. Israeli weddings are typically HUGEEE and she seemed to keep pointing at the roses, so I made sure to make my point by repeating myself a number (maybe 10) times. 

It took some convincing, but after a few days of going back and repeating myself again and again, it seemed as though Rebecca understood what I wanted. Albeit she was perplexed as to why I didn't want roses. Or glitter in my bouquet. But she agreed. And then I had to let it go, and hope for the best. It wasn't like this little flower stand was going to make prototypes of what I wanted!

Now that the wedding has been and gone, I wouldn't change a thing with the flowers. They were one of my favourite things at our wedding. Rebecca was such a gem and delivered everything she said she would, how she would. My bouquet was perfect, and she made very sweet pins for Jared and my father. I wish she had her little flower stand here in D.C.

To create the tea party, we borrowed tables, table cloths, vases, and tea cups from the Pilgrim Reception Centre and filled the vases with the flowers. My mother-in-law leant us about a dozen sets of all different candle sticks, but seeing as though there were fire hazard restrictions as to lighting them, we used battery-operated fairy lights to simulate the candle glow.

We served gorgeous little tea cakes from the famous Israeli patisserie Dudu Outmezgin. And grapes and strawberries. 

The wedding cake was from Dudu also. Neither of us are too keen on wedding cake but we kept this part of tradition for the guests - cos the cake was AMAZING (I couldn't eat any cos I'm allergic to everything that was in it. But I ate my piece the next day when noone was looking.)

Successfully weasled our way out of feeding each other cake in front of everyone. Phew!