...and, sure, I'll start.

My parents got married after a whirlwind courtship of about three months. My mom was 18 and my dad 21. She had just graduated from high school and was working in a local diner. My dad was in the Army, stationed at a base nearby, and they met while going out in a group. When my dad received his orders for Viet Nam, they had to decide whether to act - and they did. They decided to get married. My mom's family being strict Catholic, they opposed the idea of this wedding with a heathen Fundamentalist Christian from Texas. They couldn't get married in the Church, so my mom put on an awesome white lace minidress and a little white-flower headband, and my dad put a buttoniere in his suit, and they went to the Justice of the Peace with two relatives as witnesses and got married. They came back to my grandmother's house, where she (a great cook) had prepared a delicious spread including a wonderful cake...even though this marriage didn't fit her definition of Catholic propriety. Everybody ate, and then my folks drove off to Niagara Falls.

I know less about my grandparents' weddings. There's a great photo of my maternal grandparents getting married - Grandma in a nice satiny knee-length dress, her brother and sister-in-law standing up with them. I don't think I've seen any photos of my paternal grandparents' wedding, though I have seen my Grandfather in uniform, a wonderfully earnest-looking fella, who headed off to World War II young children at home, fortunately returning so that my father could be born. My grandmother was from a family of (I think) eight, and she was the oldest, and they were always hardworking and not wealthy. I'm not sure what their wedding was like, but probably not extravagant.

Ah, I wish I had photos here! My father wore his dress uniform (he's a Marine) and my mother was in a very late 70s hippie sort of number- a plain white chiffon number with a handkerchief hem, spaghetti straps, and a little lace jacket with a high collar. The Best Man was my father's father. Bridesmaids were my father and mothers' sisters, in white blouses and long green skirts. All the ladies had wreaths of flowers in their hair. They got married at a church- it was whatever church my grandparents were going to at the time, I presume. The honeymoon was a drive to where my father was going to be stationed in AZ- now THAT album is hysterical, who knew my parents ever looked so thin, so YOUNG and so goofy?

I wish I had the photos too! My folks have 'em all.

...and good Lord, my family has TWO elopements...the older sisters on both sides, before my parents' marriage even, ran off and got secretly married before cluing in the rest of the family and making it official! Oy. Heh.

My parents' wedding was at a registry office (i.e. civil ceremony) with bare minimum of people. There are no photos that I know of.

Apparently my father just booked it and said "Look, I've spent the fee: you've got to marry me now or the money's wasted."

They're very pragmatic and wouldn't have wanted a big wedding anyway. But also they are a mixed-race couple and my father's family at least disapproved, so a big wedding wasn't really on the cards.

They're still married 38 years later.

I wish I had the photos too, but it was a traditional Indian upper class brahmin wedding. You have a multiple day affair, with feasts where everyone's seated on the floor and eating off a palm leaf, kids run around and entertain each other, and the adults gather around a huge fire to watch the religious ceremony. Usually, the groom is listening to a priest chant prayers and he repeats it. Sometimes the fathers are involved, and the males usually do most of the ceremonial stuff. Here's my cousin's wedding from ~1 year ago: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3634/3380317012_9574da8b40.jpg?v=0

Eep, let me try that again:

My cousin's wedding from ~1 year ago

≡ Click to see image ≡
My parents married with a High Mass In Latin, at the Cathedral, by the Arch Bishop. The party involved most of my dad's 13 siblings and all the drinking and carry-on you might expect from good poor Irish Catholic stock...

Beautiful colors in that picture, theicono.

Arse, I gotta love that gingerbread-house cake! And your dad sorta resembles Paul McCartney, in that Irish all-grin-and-eyebrows way.

My paternal grandparents eloped to Arizona two days after the 1929 stock market crash (a Halloween wedding!)

I don't remember many details about my maternal grandparents wedding---my grandmother dictated a family history to a psychiatrist when my uncle was first diagnosed with bipolar--all I recall is that she was 16 and my grandfather wouldn't consummate the marriage because of his own mental illness.

My parents had a huge wedding at the Hillcrest country club; they called it a "Goodbye, Columbus" wedding.

My stepuncle took his GF to Paris to get married.

My half uncle only wanted my mother and stepuncle at his first wedding; his second was larger, but I couldn't be there because I was about to leave Iowa.

My dad's brother was married at the Griffith Park Observatory and it was written up in the LA Times. He had dated my aunt in the early 60's, but they broke up and didn't get back in touch with each other for 20-odd years;during which time Eugene was living with someone with two sons of her own--he's still a (grand)father figure to them and their kids.

I think they and my step-uncle and aunt have the most stable marriages in the family.

I haven't got a clue.

My parents had to get married in the church lobby because she was expecting and the priest wouldn't do the ceremony in the chapel. She wasn't allowed to wear white either so she wore a tweed skirt suit. She was 5'10" and skinny (and 19) so she looks great in the pictures anyway.

I have pictures of my parent's wedding but they're not scanned in or anything - they were 19, it was a small ceremony at the First Presbyterian Church and it was pouring rain. They had dinner at my paternal grandparent's house with their friends. They look incredibly happy in the pictures, but so so young.

I've linked to this picture of my maternal grandparents before. That's my granddad on the left and the minister on the right. I think my grandma looks stunning in that dress. Grandpa was only 18 or 19 and the time but Grandma was older.

My mother's parents eloped at City Hall. Nonnie cooked my grandfather dinner and then went home to cook her brothers and father dinner every night for about six months and then got pregnant.

My father's parents got married in the neighborhood Catholic church, at a mass, with attendants, and then everyone changed clothes and had a party in someone's apartment. I know this only because I know they got married in the local custom and that was the neighborhood way of getting married. When my grandfather died (of war injuries, after surviving the war), my grandmother *never* spoke of him again. I have my grandmother's wedding dress in a box in my closet, it's impossibly delicate and the veil goes on for days. When I found the wedding dress, after she died, I realized that this is not a picture of her wedding, but a picture of her standing up in someone else's wedding.

My parents had a wedding mass, the long kind, with six or so attendants each. They had a banquet hall reception, with centerpieces, dancing, and a drunk photographer. Then they drove to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon.

My aunts', uncles', and cousins' weddings include: (1) high holy wedding masses with receptions at posh hotels, (2) scaled-back wedding masses with catered receptions, or receptions at home, (3) an elopement shoved under the rug as quickly as possible, (4) an elopement with a masquerade ball to celebrate some months later, (5) a city hall wedding with a weekend long party some months later to celebrate the wedding, among other happy things, (6) a city hall wedding with a traditional white-dress-dinner reception on their 10th anniversary, (7) nondenominational religion-light ceremonies with receptions at those midwest banquet halls or in someone's backyard, and (7) a ceremony conducted by the siblings of the couple followed by a raucous party.

The brides wore everything from billowy white princess dresses to yellow sundresses. Most of the receptions had dancing (one had karaoke love songs to sing to the couple), all had lots of booze, one had a fire alarm emergency, so all the wedding party climbed on the fire truck to have photos taken. Somewhere, there is video of me, missing my bounce-target in a mosh pit and sliding across the dance floor on my butt. One reception (in the early 80's) had the neighbor rushing home to change into her belly dancing gear to dance, and a goat.

The rabbi refused to marry my parents because my father wasn't Jewish, so they went to a justice of the peace. And my mom was upset because she knew his old girlfriend wasn't completely out of the picture. Not a great way to start, but they did have 26 years of mostly good times.

My maternal grandmother went to nursing school solely for the purpose of finding a doctor to marry. She found one, and never worked a day in her life, as a nurse or anything else (even after her husband died in his early 40s). Not sure how the wedding went...to this day, both sides of that family hate each other.

I love the story of MuddDude's parent's wedding by the way: They got married in Northridge, in the middle of the summer (talk about hot!), so the ceremony itself was only 14 minutes long. Of course, it was followed by 4 different parties spread throughout the Valley, all in one night.

1) The official reception (I believe somewhere on the CSUN campus, where MuddDude's grandfather was a professor),
2) The after-party at the grandparent's house,
3) The after-after-party at a friend's house, followed by
4) An after-after-after-party at their apartment, for anyone who was still awake at 3am.

Basically, they came from a family of hard partiers. There's no way MuddDude and I had the energy to do anything resembling that.

My parents do not discuss their wedding (of course, they really don't talk much at all or even spend time in the same room anymore, but 'tevs) but there's only one picture that I've seen of my mother in her wedding dress. She keeps it on top of her dresser in their bedroom. She doesn't look particularly happy in the photo, but that's not surprising considering that as far as my understanding of timing is concerned, she had probably just found out that she might've been pregnant with my older brother.

I know even less about my grandparents' weddings. My mother's side? Who the hell really knows. I've never even met most of them, except for one of my mother's brothers and that was only just being pointed out to him from across my mother's mother's funeral. (Yes, my family is seriously dysfunctional.) My father's side? There's only one picture that we had to pay to get restored since it was quite torn up and damaged.

It's a nice picture though. My grandmother is sitting on her husband's lap and he has this crazy bouffant and she's got one leg kicked out and so you can see her shoe. It's quite racy for the time period and they look quite happy. Of course, I never met him since he died of lung cancer before I was even born. She never remarried but I believe has passed her crazy domestic cooking genes down to me because I can't seem to fuck up much in the kitchen. (My father tells me that she cooked everything from scratch and had a HGUE vegetable garden and everything. And she used to do quite a bit of work with starting her local Red Cross chapter.)

It's sad, but I know nothing about either of my Grandparent's weddings. I've seen one photo of each, and that's it. Come to think of it, all I know of my parents wedding is from five or six snapshots taken on the church steps after the ceremony. I don't even know if they had a reception.

I don't know anything at all about my grandparents' weddings. My parents got married in a rabbi's study with ten people as guests. My mom wore a pink dress with a pink flowered bolero jacket, which is still hanging in her closet today, 38 years later.

I think if I asked I could get the story of my mother's folks. My dad's mother's story is this: she'd come over to the U.S. illegally, but would travel back and forth between Juárez and El Paso all the time. One time she got 'caught' and was not allowed back in.

So a quick wedding was arranged on a bridge, with her on one side, Grandpa on the other, and the judge in between. Once they were married, she was a citizen, and could cross over. No pictures, no dates - probably because some of my aunts had already been born. This is some time in the mid-'30's.

She had a tendency to airbrush the past a lot and given the trials she'd had since childhood, it's understandable.

Makes for a good story, though.

Reading this thread I realized that I know almost nothing of my maternal grandmother's wedding and I've never seen a photograph. It was in 1938, she was 18 years old and I know she was knocked up for the second time (the first time ended in an abortion - in 1936 or 1937). And I know my great-grandparents didn't approve of my grandfather (poor white trash). Nonnie got married a total of three times and Grandpa four times.

I know even less about my paternal grandparents wedding (or anything, really). My grandmother couldn't even keep the guy's name straight - it was either William or George and he was her third or fourth or husband and she had at least one husband after him.

My great-grandmother secretly got married when she was 15. She and a neighboring farm boy rode a horse and buggy to the adjacent county and were married by a justice of the peace. They each went home that night to their respective homes and didn't work up the courage to tell their parents for two weeks!

My parents met at college, she was 21 from Denver and he 20 from Alaska. He had to wire his parents for permission to marry since the legal marrying age was 21; they did not attend. My mother and her mom made her wedding dress, which is still beautiful if a bit yellowed. Two other couples were married at the same time, but I know nothing about the ceremony or reception. They bought her brother's car for the long drive back to Alaska, there's a photo of my mother at the Canadian border likely wondering what she had gotten herself into.

My parents got married in somewhat of a rush since my mother's mother was already very sick with brain cancer at that point and they wanted to have her see them wed. They got married on my father's parent's porch with 25 total guests.
My mother wore a bibbed Mexican peasant dress with short sleeves (which looked awesome on my when I tried it on in high school) and my father wore a light blue suit.
They were hippies so they "registered" for handmade pottery and plants, none of which have survived today, unfortunately.