The Perfect Christmas vs. The Perfect Wedding

Been catching up on my podcasts this week, and was really struck by a very incisive comment about Christmas which showed up in a This American Life podcast and went a little something like this:

You know that saying “you can tell who a person is in a crisis”. I think you can really tell at Christmas too. This is because Christmas, more than any other day in the year, is the one day when we’re all handed the same stage props. The same tree, the meal, the relatives, and the same set of expectations.

Thinking about it, this is a very good analogy for a wedding. Every couple gets handed the same set of props – the ceremony, the reception, the vows – to create a day for which everyone has the same expectations. Happy ones, hopefully.

The piece continues:

And then we all try and create, more or less, the same kind of day. It’s like hundreds of millions of people all set to work doing exactly the same art project. And not just any art project – a very high stakes art project, and one that everyone cares a great deal about getting right. And in that setting, the choices people make never seem clearer.

Yikes – that’s exactly how I’ve been seeing this wedding: a high-stakes project that millions of people have completed before us and millions of people will complete after us. And somehow we have to get it ‘right’, the choices we make must guarantee a perfect outcome. But, unlike Christmas, we don’t get to try again next year. We just get our one chance to create ‘The Perfect Day’.

The podcast finishes on a slightly bittersweet note on the scene of a family  photograph:

This is what Christmas is all about. Everybody’s posed. Everybody’s ready. Everybody’s straining to be happy. Everybody has this picture in their head of the perfect Christmas. And of course it’s never going to live up to that picture, it’s never going to be perfect, and so disappointment is built into the very structure of the day. The best that you can do, the best you can hope for, is to ride out the imperfections.

When I first heard that I mentally substituted the word ‘Wedding’ for the word ‘Christmas’ and got an apparently insightful, but ultimately rather pessimistic view of planning a wedding. It’s always going to go wrong, there are always going to be things that don’t meet up to the ideal. We aim for perfection, but will always fall short.

But is perfection what we should really be aiming for anyway? I’ve been to several parties where the host is so caught up with making sure everything is ‘just so’ and that everyone is having fun they don’t enjoy the party themselves – and consequently none of their guests do either.

It’s then I started realising that I was reading far too much into it all, and getting far too bogged down. Unlike Christmas, a wedding is not a day based around a vague concept of happiness and togetherness that has become so disconnected from its origins to be rendered essentially meaningless. A marriage is something genuinely happy, something amazing, something people don’t have to try to hard to get excited about.

Although I’m certain the day will likely have a few wobbly moments practically, and a few bits that aren’t to everyone’s tastes, the occasion of the day itself will hopefully be so great that minor disappointments won’t have to be ‘ridden out’ –  they can be pretty much forgotten.