Hi! I'm Taryn, a writer, designer and soon-to-be-bride from Atlanta, Georgia. Sit a spell with me and catch up as I plan the wedding of my beer-loving, confetti-throwing dreams to the wonderful Mr. Williford.Sharing Our Wedding Weekend with Pride, Part 1
Picking a wedding day is kind of a big deal, yeah? Something you shouldn’t just throw a dart at a calendar to decide. In retrospect, I feel like Rooster and I probably should have thought about it more.
We didn’t think we’d ever be in the position to just pick a date out of the blue, but our venue had a wide open calendar. We set our sights on October because it’s a beautiful time of year and stays mostly dry (we’re praying to the rain gods here). And why did we pick October 11th? No real reason. It starts to get chilly towards the end of October so we thought the first half of the month might be more temperate. But why not October 4th? Or October 18th? I don’t know. We just didn’t think about it. We just picked a day.
Target Practice Dart Calendar, by Studio Dorogaya via Behance
The truth is, I was looking for something to guide our date selection. Specifically, the SEC fall football schedule. As a born and bred Gator fan and University of Florida alumna, Southeastern Conference football is like a religion to me. The same goes for most of my family and all my friends from college. As soon as we decided on a fall wedding, it was imperative that I pick a wedding day that didn’t fall on a big game weekend. (This is not an isolated problem, people.) Or else I’d have to talk Rooster into moving the wedding to The Swamp.
Dream Day Cakes
The thing is, the announcement of the 2014 SEC football schedule was strangely delayed last year. Like, a lot delayed. Rooster’s prized Michigan Wolverines had a 2014 football schedule in place since May 2013. But we picked our venue in July 2013 and still had heard nothing from the SEC. Before that football schedule comes out, picking a Saturday in October to get married is like running through a minefield.
So even though we knew exactly where we wanted to get married, we decided to wait for the SEC schedule to pick a date and sign a contract. So we waited. And waited. And waited. And in no time, we found ourselves in the middle of August with the SEC schedule still missing in action. We really wanted to lock in our venue, so Rooster and I decided we couldn’t wait any longer.
We closed our eyes and picked October 11th, 2014 as our date, and signed the venue contract on August 16th.
And on August 21st, the SEC announced the Gators’ schedule. You saw that coming, right?
Our wedding just happens to fall on the same day as the Florida-LSU game. Only one of the biggest games of the year for Florida, with our long-standing cross-division rival (and Miss Pyramid’s team). And it’s usually an evening matchup, meaning the game will start at probably the exact same time as our evening ceremony. Oops. Our friends and family will just have to choose—us or the game. (Although more than one of them has asked if it’s OK if they bring an iPad to watch during the ceremony—I think jokingly, but who knows.)
We considered changing our date for the game, but decided it wasn’t that big of a deal. At least not until Rooster and I realized we would be sharing our wedding weekend with Pride. Literally. Part 2 →
