My Irish Wedding

Since my family is very much into our Irish culture, my husband and I decided to have an Irish themed wedding. We chose the weekend of St. Patrick's Day and held it at St. Benedict's Roman Catholic Church, had the groomsmen all wear kilts, handfasting, and of course bag pipers. All of the grooms men were dressed in kilts we were able to rent from Dunedin Scottish a store in Dunedin, Florida. I am trying to get some pictures of our wedding on this blog, so you can see what they looked like. The groom's kilt is slightly different from the others because of the sporran. The sporrans use is almost like a fanny pack. The kilts have no pockets so they would have sporrans in front made of leather and usually fur ( like horse hair). The groom's sporran is pure white, while the rest can be of a different color (usually grey or black). While the men wore dress kilts, the women can wear their husband's colors in her scarf, which she would wear diagonally across her body, to signify her leaving her family and coming to her husband's family. Besides dressing in kilt and scarf there are other traditions you can incorporate into your wedding. For instance, in my wedding we added hand fasting. The shop we rented our kilts from had also made the hand fasting scarf for us. We told our last names and they were able to look up what counties our families (based on our names) were from and thus our tartan colors. They take a stip of my families' tartan and embroider my initials into one end then sew the other end to my husbands' families' tartan (which also has his initials at the other end) in the middle where our tartan's meet they sew intertwining gold rings. After you take your wedding vows, they preist would take the scarf and tie it around our hands and say a prayer. Signifing our two families coming together as one. Then he turned us around and announced us as husband and wife. Afterwards we were lead back down the ailse by a bag piper. By incorporating my wedding with my culture I was able to make the ceremony my own and created a lasting impresion on my family memebers who had never seen an handfasting before.