HEATHER IJAMES: Be ready for a shake-up after the beautiful wedding sand ceremony
| Friday, Jul 09 2010 10:23 AM
Last Updated Friday, Jul 09 2010 10:26 AM
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Alex Horvath / The Californian Contributing columnist Heather Ijames.
Ah, marriage. Love, companionship and joint tax returns. It doesn't get any better than that.
Marriage has been on my mind lately because of a wedding I recently attended. It was a beautiful ceremony. A lot of your typical events transpired, but the one thing new to me was what they called the sand ceremony.
It was evident the sand ceremony is similar to the unity candle ceremony I've seen at other weddings -- minus the risk of accidental combustion of either a veil or a heavily hair-sprayed coif.
At this particular wedding, the idea of the sand ceremony was incorporated after bridesmaid Cindy Neighbors told the couple her son had done it at his Maui wedding five years earlier. Neighbors recently spoke to me about the sand ceremony at her son's wedding.
"The wedding hostess (in Maui) recommended it because the beach is too windy to light unity candles," she told me.
Neighbors went on to explain some of the behind-the-scenes details. "The bride and groom each choose a sand color that somehow represents them. Their chosen colors are placed in separate clear glass containers sitting one on each side of a larger clear glass container," she explained.
The way it transpired at the wedding I attended was as follows:
One small vase had white sand in it and the other had brown. The bride took the vase with the white sand and the groom took the vase with the brown sand. They then took several turns gingerly pouring the contents of their respective vases into a larger vase. As they were pouring, puffs of dust billowed gently up in the air. (I want you to remember this part for later because I promise to get back to it.) The result was several neat layers of white and brown sand, coming together in the big vase and resting comfortably.
The pastor officiating then mentioned that the larger, now full, vase was a picture of marriage inasmuch as the two separate parts came together to form a whole, and each part is now unable to pull away in the same way it had entered. The two are forever intermingled.
It was then -- between seeing the pretty layers of sand, and the opportunity to forgo a potential mess with hot, burning candle wax -- that I decided the sand ceremony was the way to go in the department of unity gestures at a wedding.
But one question remained.
That's when I leaned over to my husband and said, "Isn't someone going to shake the daylight out of that vase? That's what happens in the real world, right? I mean, marriage isn't a bunch of pretty layers that stay still. And once kids and a mortgage come into the picture. ..."
My husband simply gave me a look.
But it didn't get me to stop thinking about it.
The way I figure, if someone shakes the vase up at the end of the ceremony, it not only better represents the reality of what society intends to do to every marriage, it also better exemplifies the theory that once you're in, there's no way to pick up all your individual pieces and skedaddle back to who you were. Because now, man and wife are not a repetitive and pretty layer of white and brown, they're a monochromatic mass of oneness, a blur of tan.
Am I making this sound romantic or what? A blur of tan and joint tax returns. But I digress.
Do you remember when I mentioned the billowing puffs of dust? That should be part of the symbolism, too. When the two become one, many things go up in a puff of dust, never to be seen again. Bad things like losing absolute sovereignty on where you squeeze the toothpaste, and good things like ugly bedroom furniture getting dropped off at Goodwill.
And once the dust settles overhead, it's time to conclude the ceremony. This is where the couple should put a big, solid -- and I'll personally suggest divine -- hand over the vase so that when the world shakes the marriage, nothing or no one spills out.
Of course, if I let Neighbors finish what the layers actually represent, then you might not want to shake up the vase just yet. She wrote to me: "The groom begins by pouring a small portion of his sand into the larger container. This layer of sand represents his life up to now and the foundation he is laying for his wife and future family. The bride then pours in a small portion on top of his sand. This second layer represents her life up to now and her willingness to add her life to his and that their lives from this point on would be built together."
And so on and so forth. Except I still think the vase is going to get shaken. Make sure you have a covering.
-- Heather Ijames is one of four conservative community columnists whose work appears here every Saturday. These are the opinions of Ijames, not necessarily The Californian's. You can send e-mail to her at hijames@bakersfield.com.
Next week: Inga Barks.
