And the Bride Wore Crimson
By Lynn Caldwell
Special to The Irish American Post

I've had two weddings -- thankfully to the same man -- though they took place on two continents, Europe and North America. We officially tied the knot in a Baptist church on Vancouver Island -- where I call home when I'm not talking about Dublin -- in a morning ceremony. I walked down the aisle to an Irish fiddle player playing the air that my husband Martin had composed for me. We followed the vows with a luncheon reception in a house designed by renowned architect Samuel Maclure, overlooking the Georgia Straight and Mistaken and Ballenas islands, with the coast mountains of the mainland hovering blue behind them.

The second one was a couple of months later, and we called it the Irish launch of our marriage. To lend a sense of occasion to the event, we decided to have a bit of a ceremony in our own church in Dublin. We walked down the aisle together, again in our best wedding gear, to a piper friend playing the same tune, and we made vows that we had written ourselves. This could only be followed by a hooley and we had the good fortune to be able to use a grand Georgian house just outside Dublin that is now an Irish culture and language club, Arás Chronáin.
After a meal with almost as many guests as the original fling, we were joined with another 150 or so friends and relatives for the afters. The trend these days is to invite close friends and family to the full shebang, and those whom you'd like to include but cannot for reasons of cash or space or sanity, you invite for drinks and snacks and dancing later. For obvious reasons, this is known as the afters. 

So we had Khanda, the world music band that's laced with jazz musicians, followed by a cacophony of sessions in the various rooms. Fiddles, pipes, guitars, flutes, bodhráns, you name it, they played it. We reeled and jigged into the wee hours.

But it's a new thing here in Ireland: real second weddings. They've been happening only since the divorce referendum and happily are still rare enough. A friend, divorced, recently married a never-before-wedded man and had another full white church wedding because his staunch Protestant relatives -- not the close family, mind you -- did not know she'd done this already.

Two musician friends, one a divorcé, the other officially a spinster, were married last year. The ceremony was held in the new room at the registry office, a larger, more comfortable room, reflecting the growing numbers of people now tying the knot outside the arches of the church. Just a few close friends and some family were present there: we and a hundred or so others were invited to the reception which was cozily held at their place, a Georgian house that was the bride's family home. 

To start with, the friend -- let's call them Ellen and David -- were unprepared for the response they received upon the announcement of their upcoming nuptials. People, acquaintances even, were more emotional than Ellen and David anticipated and the neighbor, with whom they weren't particularly chummy, on hearing the news in a local shop offered with teary eyes to arrange the flowers, as her gift to the couple.

The groom and the bride, in a red velvet gown designed by the costume designer for Ireland's national theater, the Abbey, met us at the door with glasses of champagne. The neighbor's flowers, far from the few carnations and bit of baby's breath that Ellen expected, were cascading down the banister. White lilies, dark green ivy, set off by crimson roses were in every corner, on the mantelpieces, gracing the baby grand in the dining room. The deep woodsy green with dashes of white and scarlet lent a celebratory air to the home.

No simple home reception this: prawns hot, in filo pastry, handed round by tuxedoed waiters, dinner equally sumptuous, an elegant marquis in the back garden where we danced under the light of a small glass chandelier, artists and neighbors and friends meeting on the stairs, sitting before the range in the kitchen, clustered in the sitting room, it was all chat and warmth, wine and red roses.

We talked jazz and babies' names and theater gossip and what the main exports of Mauritius were. There wasn't much to mark this wedding as anything out of the Irish ordinary; all the guests wanted to do was celebrate, wishing the very best for the bride and groom. But just to remind us that this was that bit different from other weddings we'd been to, David's ex-wife and her new husband were there. Obviously most of us were meeting her for the first time. One friend when introduced shook her hand, looked her straight in the eye and said the first thing that came to his mind, "You must be very proud!"

It was another first for us: the first time we were the last to leave a wedding, the bride and groom and we two drinking wine before the fire. This was after the afters. Candles burning low, the flowers still subtly fragrant. We left into the quiet of a Dublin night, still warm from the dancing and the wine, one of the mantels empty and me balancing a joyous armful of white, green and red. Best wishes all round.
 
 

Lynn Caldwell is an award-winning Canadian freelance writer who lives with -- and loves -- an uilleann piper and a gorgeous wee colleen in Dublin.