Turn your Thanksgiving dinner into a wedding feast!

                                   Meet the better half.

Do you have a wedding engagement to be thankful for this year?  Why not make it official with a Thanksgiving wedding at home?   Just like the dinner, it requires a little advance planning, but if you season it right you can have a family occasion that’s sweet as pumpkin pie.

People love having intimate family weddings during the holiday season for aesthetic as well as practical reasons--lots of festive decor and good food are abundantly available, and often friends and relatives are already flying or driving to gather in one location.  A wedding before, during, or after your meal can be a lovely way to surprise and delight your guests, and (bonus!) save some money on food and entertainment.

Here are some ideas and cautions:

Carefully consider whether you want to prepare your own dinner; you don’t want to be exhausted by the time your wedding rolls around, but it can also be a beautiful gesture for you and your intended to create the meal, get married, and serve it to your guests as a thank-you for being a loving and supportive community.  

If that idea doesn’t thrill you, sit back and relax; you can hire a chef or caterer willing to roast that turkey for you (or goose, or pheasant, or turducken.)  In larger cities many restaurants and grocery stores offer pre-made holiday meals that you can pick up or have delivered right to your table----luxury of luxuries for those of us who don’t dream of cooking all day!  These are often just as good as homemade, and you can enhance that store-cooked turkey with customary ancestral side-dishes if you wish.  There’s the good old-fashioned Turkey Day pot luck too; having everyone bring a little something to share not only eases the workload, but creates a spirit of generosity that greatly enhances the meaning of the event.  

Don’t forget the wedding pie!  FYI--back in the waaaaay-old days--there were such things as “bride pies” before cakes became the fashionable thing.  They weren’t pumpkin pies, but hey....it’s great to merge an old tradition (or recipe) with a new one, and lots of people prefer pie to cake anyway.

As for other wedding amenities (flowers, entertainment, and of course the officiant) expect to pay more and have fewer choices if you get married over any holiday weekend; many service providers take the holidays off or charge additional fees.  If you have a friend qualified to conduct weddings who happens also to be a Thanksgiving orphan--that is, a person with no dinner plans on T-Day--voila!  You have a great candidate to conduct your ceremony and the perfect set-up to punk your other guests (“oh poor Jimmy, we felt so sorry for him, no where to have dinner on Thanksgiving so we invited him over....”)  Just be sure you don’t get any cranberry sauce, gravy, or wine on the marriage license; that will render it unrecordable in most jurisdictions, so you might want to keep the paperwork away from the dining area.

Look into getting your marriage license well in advance--start planning NOW if you want to get married next on Thanksgiving, as some states have waiting periods and you might need a day or two to dig out the necessary documents for your area--birth certificates or divorce decrees or whatever else is required.   Obviously, your county offices will be closed on the holiday, so bring your fiance(e) along to apply for your marriage license and help with the grocery shopping before the holiday rolls around.

I’ve done a couple surprise weddings on Thanksgiving, once implementing the “Thanksgiving orphan” ploy: I whipped out my briefcase as the dinner dishes were being cleared and we had the wedding, then pie.  This was very well received, especially the pie part.

Another time I popped in just as family and guests were arriving for dinner; we performed the ceremony once everyone had arrived and then the Thanksgiving meal doubled as the reception.  This also worked nicely, and gave everyone something to talk about at dinner (a good thing with this particular family group.)

In both these instances I issued the marriage license--here in California some of us are authorized to do that--though I made a point of coming a day or two beforehand to take care of the paperwork to minimize the aforementioned cranberry/gravy/wine hazard and brainstorm about the wedding roll-out to maximize the impact and the fun.

Finally, if you’re not engaged, why not beat the Christmas rush and propose at the Thanksgiving table?  Lots of couples wait until Christmas or New Year’s to pop the question, but I think Thanksgiving is an excellent opportunity as well.  Just be sure to hide the ring in the turkey after it’s out of the oven; hours of roasting will etch the ring and make the stuffing taste funny.

Whether your holiday centers around food, football, or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, remember at some point during the day to offer up a little thanks for your significant other and for this amazing power of Love that makes life a wonderful thing.  And don’t forget the pie--also makes life a little bit sweeter.

Until next time, a sweet and long life to you all (and lots of pie.)

Elizabeth Oakes welcomes your feedback at weddingexaminer@gmail.com.