Dear Grandma,

I want you to know how often you were in my thoughts on my wedding day.  I know you wanted to be there.  Although you weren’t with me, I wanted you to be able to share our special day.  I decide to write a diary of our wedding weekend.  I made lots of mental notes throughout the weekend so that I could write you a long letter with all the details.  

I hope it helps bridge the miles between us, and that you can imagine what our wedding was like. Two days after the celebration, we left for our honeymoon.  It was on the long drive north to Canada’s Arctic that I wrote this journal for you.  As I type it out now on the computer, I am reliving it all again.  I hope you enjoy it with me

I love you,

Shona

The day before…                               Friday, August 22 2003 

Lucy is our friend from Australia.  She had come to join us for our wedding and had been staying at our house. 

Friday morning…Lucy and Blair spent the better part of two hours running up and down the stairs with the boxes upon boxes of stuff to go to the wedding site.  They were loading the van to ‘stuffed full’.

Where was I you ask?  Waiting in line at the chiropractor’s office of course.  But I’m ahead of myself.  Let me back up.  On Thursday night, like all good pre-wedding couples, we were both dashing around in a mad effort to sort out all of the things and stuff that needed attending.  Blair was burning CD’s from his computer and although he was putting in massive effort, he was effectively creating coasters.  Every disc would fail in it’s recording at about track 17.  In the mean time I was pulling out boxes of wine from our storage room.  As I pulled ...(and prayed) ...and pried ...and shoved them from their wedged in space above my head, I would ease each case of wine to the end of the shelf and drop it unceremoniously off the edge and defying gravity, precariously catch and balance it on my shoulder.  Repeating this gymnastic act four times in turn, I staggered to the kitchen under the weight of each case of wine and deposited it on the counter.  I then hauled out box after box of carefully collected (read: spent months in the dollar stores) bits of wedding decorations - napkins, candles, plastic bobbles, Christmas lights, streamers and fake flowers.  At last it was all in an enormous pile at the front door.

It was at about this point that Blair proclaimed, “All the CD’s are junk, and we need to buy new blanks.”  He was going to have to re-burn them all before we heading out to the wedding site on Friday morning, or we would have dead air inbetween band sets.

So, back to Friday morning… Blair and I rose early, left Lucy to pack her stuff up, and headed off for coffee and to buy new CD’s. 

We made it to Starbucks’s and after experiencing world’s slowest beverage production line (this, of course, only happens when one is in a hurry) collected our drinks and made to leave.  I pushed the door open and froze.  Pain shot down my back and down my left buttock.  Blair could see by the look on my face something was wrong, but I couldn’t even form the words to tell him the problem.  Eventually I managed, “Take my cup, my back’s gone”.  After a few terrifying moments, the pain disappeared as quickly as it had come.

It was a very close call.  I was extremely lucky.  The lingering result of an SI joint dislocation 6 years ago, my back periodically goes out, and had gone out like that before - but it usually takes a few days to right itself.  As you can imagine the words NOT THE DAY BEFORE MY WEDDING  went screaming through my head.

Blair quickly whipped into London Drugs, bought his CD’s and drove me home.  I went to the Chiropractor’s leaving him and poor Lucy to drag all the gear down three flights of stairs and into the van.

On the way home from the Chiro, feeling much relieved, I stopped by the goldsmith’s to pick up the bangle I had chosen for Mum as a thank you for making my beautiful dress.

As Blair went down to start the van, Luc and I stood in the kitchen checking things off on our fingers.  Candles, wine, decorations, suit, shoes, wine glasses, Christmas lights, wedding dress…

“Dress! Oh!  I’ve forgotten the dress!”  It really was a good thing Luc was thinking.  I was so worried about crushing the silk that I’d left the dress hanging in the closet until the end.  If it hadn’t been for her, I’d have left the dress altogether.

Blair, eager to leave, was just shy of revving the engine by the time we slugged down the stairs for the last time.  Lucy squashed herself into the back seat of the van, which was laden with boxes and clothes.  We had yet to get the flowers!

200m down the road and we were at the flower shop, to collect everything from our florist Judy.  She’d done a marvelous job.  I’d been in the week before and placed the order.  The instructions were to use orange lilies and bear grass with purple or white heather.  I was told that, unfortunately, heather isn’t available in Canada in August.  So we used these pretty little purple flowers that grow in pointy stick like shapes that do a good imitation of heather.

The bouquet was $35, and Judy told me that if I just wanted loose flowers for my hair and to decorate tables and cakes, I’d save a bundle over having loads of arrangements pre-made.  She very kindly pulled out a bunch of daisies and freesia (little purple flowers) and showed me how to wire them using florist tape and thin wire so that they could be put in my hair.  For a grand total of  $75, I had armloads of flowers.

Safeway, which is across the street from the florists, was the next stop.  It would be today that I run out of birth control.  That just won’t do for a wedding night!  I had to go and fill my prescription.  ‘Course on the way into Safeway, I just happened to notice that baby’s breath and these tiny dark purple flowers that smelled fabulous were on sale.  Needless to say I came out of Safeway with another couple bunches of flowers.

Blair managed to magically find a place for all the newly acquired “extra” flowers without damaging any of them.  (My hero).  And we were off!

240 km later, through the Rocky Mountains, we arrived at Beaverfoot Lodge.  A very informal wedding, we wanted most of our friends to come out to camp for the weekend, join us for our ceremony, enjoy the pig roast and outdoor party while sharing our celebration.  Nestled in the Kicking Horse river valley and back dropped by the glorious snowcapped Canadian Rockies, Beaverfoot Lodge offers a large treed camping area including fire pits and picnic tables.  A dirt floored, metal roofed, walless dining shelter adjoins a similarly laid out bar area and dance floor.  It was perfect for us.

Barely visible through the trees and up the hill from the campsite, is the lodge.  Its limited facilities include 11 rooms for guests, 2 shared bathrooms, a small bar area, small kitchen and sitting room.  It’s the sitting room that really sets the mood of the place.  Full of stuffed, furry dead things, it boasts a pot bellied stove, pine floors and walls, bearskin rugs and an eclectic collection of shabby but comfortable furniture.   It isn’t 5 star accommodation, it was rustically comfortable for those who chose not to camp. 

We unloaded the flowers, the clothes, the veggies for the midnight snack and all our gear.  As I was hauling my massive overnight bag into the lodge it occurred to me that it was somehow very wrong to be lugging make-up, a curling iron and a hair dryer into the wilderness.

Blair and I were so absorbed in what we were doing; we failed to notice our first wedding guest had already arrived!  Vanessa and her husband Robert along with their kids (Reena an Joseph) had been sitting on the front porch watching us for 10 minutes.  We had walked passed them 3 times!  I was so embarrassed.  Now, in all fairness, Vanna had left Calgary 6 years ago, wasn’t married, and didn’t have any children the last time we’d seen her.  They had driven 4 straight days and covered over 3500 km to join us from their home in Whitehorse, Yukon.  After hugs and apologies (and introductions to the kids) we all had a good laugh about how much we’d all changed.

We then headed the 200m or so from the lodge down to the campgrounds and festival area where the wedding was to take place.  Cases of pop and crates of wine were unloaded from our van and stored behind the bar.  We were ready…we were starting to relax.

It wasn’t long before quite a number of our friends and family had found their way down to us.  I had loads of help covering tables with plastic “clothes” and hanging streamers.

We called it quits at suppertime and Blair, Lucy and I headed to the lodge for dinner, with Shirley (Blair’s mom) and her boyfriend Chris, Blair’s dad – Danny – and brother Marc.  Our friend Phil (who was our old roommate from Ft. McMurray) also joined us.

We spent the rest of the evening down at the campsite with our guests, chatting, singing, playing guitar and hanging out around the (empty) fire pit.  Unfortunately, due to the extreme fire hazard (20 km away there was a forest fire burning) a fire ban was being strictly enforced.  By 11:30 Blair and I called it a night and headed off to bed in eager anticipation of our big day.

The Wedding Day…                                      Saturday, August 23, 2003

Breakfast at the lodge is served between 8 and 9, so we got up early and headed downstairs for coffee.  Sitting on the large wooden porch, sipping away, Blair and I enjoyed a few tranquil moments in the crisp mountain air.  We heard the ranch hand call the horses for their morning feed.  With nostrils flaring and mist billowing around their heads, they galloped through the field towards the barn.

Soon most of the lodge guests were gathering for breakfast , so we reluctantly gave up our porch view and meandered in to eat.

Happily fed, my future husband and I walked down the hill through the pines to the campsite to get  started with our preparations for The Big Day.  A good deal of the streamer work had suffered overnight, so as Blair, Marc and Danny hung the Christmas lights on the bar and dance floor area, we (Karyn, Lee, Lucy, Margaret Walker, Phil and I) set about with the tape and stapler to do repairs.  Shirley – very generously –blew up 40 balloons.

Clem, our caterer, had arrived and with him, his truck-pulled bbq oven and… our pig!  He and Danny dumped 16 bags of charcoal in to the bbq and set it alight.  While waiting for the oven to heat up, they wrapped the pig in tinfoil from top to bottom.  What other magic they preformed I don’t know.  It was a bit of a mystery what was going on behind the cooking shelter.  I’m not sure how much help Danny was to Clem, but he was definitely having a good time - and learning a lot.  I think it will only be a matter of time before Danny has his own pig roast.

More and more friends were arriving so our work crew was growing.  Everyone was really wonderful, people were volunteering left, right and center to help out and it was a tremendous amount of fun to have everyone assisting us to get organized.  It wasn’t long before all the tables were set, the napkins were out, candles and matches had been put on every table and except for the occasional POP! the balloons tied with ribbon were being strung up along the support posts that surrounded the eating shelter.  It was beginning to look really festive.

A couple of people who work at the ranch had cut a truck load of cedar boughs for us, so Marc and Karyn spent a couple of hours threading them all through a metal archway to create a back drop for our ceremony and photos. 

Dan (that would be Dan, Joy’s husband, not Danny, Blair’s dad) set up the beer keg he’d brought out for us from the Brew Brothers.  Dan is part owner of the brewing company and helped us get a great deal on a keg.  At that point the pre-party really started to get going.  This was about the time that my parents and brother (finally) arrived. 

Blair and Paul got the BBQ out and with Danny’s help we soon had a lunch of hot dogs and beer for everyone.  Danny then enlisted volunteers to do some prep work cutting up vegetables and sausage, which would be served during the midnight snack and loading pop and white wine into the massive water cooler behind the bar. 

We discovered that in Alberta, anyone over 18 that pays tax in Alberta can be made a marriage commissionaire for a 24 hour period. Anton Walker had generously agreed to be ours and perform our ceremony for us.  Blair and I sat down with him for a few quiet moments to go over the wedding ceremony.  I’m really glad we did a practice run.  I can’t call it a dry run.  It wasn’t.   I ended up crying through half of it!  Good, happy, sentimental crying. 

Och oh, problem…our cedar bough decorated archway was heavier on the front side than it was on the back and was tending to topple over!  Not good.  Danny came to the rescue by finding some iron bars.  By hammering them into the ground he managed to create a sort of giant lego block that we could put the hollow archway onto.  Problem solved.  Friends helped carry benches from the dinner area over to the archway.  We’d stapled plastic table cloths onto each bench earlier in the day.  Arranging them into two rows of 5 each, we formed a pseudo aisle, at the head of which stood the archway, and behind that, a view of the mountains.

As one o’clock came and went, Lee finally managed to persuade me that it really was time to get in the shower.

Lucy and Paul acted as my volunteer photographers as I dried my hair and stuck curlers in it.  As the rollers were setting, Lee wired dozens of freesia and daisies so she could weive them into my hair.  Wrapped in my towel with a mirror balanced on a stool outside on the balcony of our lodge room, I applied my make-up as Lucy took pictures. Greg, our other photo savvy friend, took shots of Blair getting ready, and the rest of the set up down at the campsite that would happen without me.

Mum came in to lend me her pearls to wear.  As she put them on we decided they were too long and detracted from the neckline of my dress.   Ever genius, she sewed a small loop into the back of the pearls, which fixed the length perfectly.  Of course it effectively meant that I couldn’t get out of them…but we’d worry about that later.  Auntie Brenda was summoned to see if she could make a corsage for mum out of the extra flowers.  She came through beautifully, creating not only a fabulous corsage, but also two gorgeous arrangements for the tables too.

As Lee was finishing with my hair (she did a really stunning job) Paul came in to take a few tri pod shots and Lucy managed to catch a great one of my Dad in his kilt.

Luc and Lee were now scrambling to get themselves ready.  They had both generously given me all their time and now only had a matter of half an hour to get scrubbed, decorated and changed themselves.  I dabbed my nails with polish (amazing how fast camping can screw up a manicure…).  I felt especially close to Mum as she did up my buttons, for me that moment will be a life long memory. 

A couple more photos, grab the bouquet, and we’re ready!

We collected oohs and ahhs from the lodge kitchen staff as we passed them, paused for a few more photos, then all piled into Dad’s van and drove the 200m down the hill to the cook shack.  Daddy and I hid behind the building until everyone was seated.  Iain sat Mum and Marc sat Shirley.

The soft sounds of our harpist, Samantha, the 10-year-old daughter of a work colleague, drifted towards us.  She was good, very good.  When qued, she changed her tune to Cannon in D and Daddy and I started to walk.  As we emerged from behind the cook shack I caught the subtle wow from the crowd and felt very pretty.  I also felt Daddy swell with pride.  My own emotion was riding close to the surface; I made it a total of 5 feet further before my eyes started to well.  Desperately trying to distract my tears, I looked at friend after friend.  No luck.  Most of them were just as bad as me.  Oh well, it didn’t really matter, I felt wonderful.  I was getting to marry my Blair!

At the end of the aisle, I kissed Daddy goodbye, he handed me to Blair, and our ceremony began.  We’d written the ceremony ourselves, it was short and heartfelt.  It was a wonderful moment when, upon hearing Anton pronounce us husband and wife, everyone started to cheer.  I was delighted.  Samantha started to play again and we walked down our makeshift aisle.  ‘Course, when we got to the end, we realized everyone would have photos of our backs with the cook shack in the distance.  So, we walked back up the aisle to once again stand in front of the archway with the mountains in the background and posed for several minutes.

This set of parents, then that, then friends.  Paul and Greg (our photographers) took Blair and I off to one side to get some more intimate shots.  I am extremely grateful to both of them for taking the time to do this for us.

With Lucy, Lee and Paul’s help, we lined up several 5oz plastic wine glasses (nothing but the best) and filled them with a selection of champagne, white and red wine.  A few quick words of thanks to the guests for coming, and a toast to us, to our future together.

In the background, behind our drinking, picture taking and general mingling, the lodge staff had laid out quite a feast.  Oriental cabbage salad, a green salad, corn on the cob, baked potatoes and the most wonderful homemade applesauce.  Mmm.  Clem the caterer gave me the signal that the roast pig had been carved and we were ready serve dinner. 

After a couple of misfires (I’m really not very good at gongs), I managed to ring the dinner bell to announce that supper was ready. 

I’m not sure who the wine fairies were, but someone had thoughtfully run around all the tables and uncorked the bottles so the merriment could flow as soon as we were seated.  Speeches aren’t really our thing, so we decided to skip them totally and just express our thanks to the people who had made a real difference to our day, and to those who had made an extra effort to join us from far away.

We announced that Vanessa and Robert along with their children Reena and Joseph, had driven from Whitehorse.  Blair’s Dad and Mom along with Chris had come from Nova Scotia.  Uncle Robin and Auntie Brenda from England, Lucy had flown from Australia and of course Mum and Dad had driven from McMurray.  Samantha Spurrier, our harpist was introduced and given a round of applause.  We has slipped her a present as people mingled around after the toast, before dinner started.

Anton was asked to come forward so we could give him big hugs and our thank yous for performing our ceremony.  We told him how important it was to us that he had agreed to be our marriage commissionaire.  Then I called up my Mum.  She made my dress for me and I know it took a tremendous effort on her part, and it meant a great deal to me.  I’m very proud of Mum and I wanted to share her talent with everyone.

By 7pm the band (our friend Adam and his bass player) was ready to go, so we started the dancing.  Again, very non formally, we didn’t follow tradition.  Dad started to sway a bit beside me so we thought we’d start the dancing off.  Blair was actually on the other side of the room!  We didn’t even think about it until after – the bride and groom are really supposed to start the dancing.  It didn’t really matter because most people were standing around chatting outside anyway.  Blair and I realized that although we weren’t interested in tradition, most people weren’t going to start dancing until we had our “first dance”.   As we were standing in the middle of the floor, ready, Adam (the singer) asked if there was anything in particular we wanted for our first song.  We looked at each other blank faced.  We hadn’t thought about it.

We shrugged, “Nope, anything’s fine.” Blair answered.

“How about ‘Oh Donna’?”

“Great!” Blair replied, then with a brainwave yelled, “Can you change it to ‘Oh, Shona’?”

And they did.  It was a blast.  I love his sense of humor, always have.

The rest of the evening rolled by with people drifting in and out, going back to their campsites pretty regularly for more clothes and returning to the festivities.  The temperature dropped pretty steadily as the night continued.  Tinder dry conditions meant the fire ban continued so wee were unable to have the planned bonfire, but Clem the caterer had dumped the remaining coals from the roast pig into the BBQ pits.  Most of the people were standing around the coals chatting and drinking, listening to the band and trying to keep warm. 

And then we saw them…It was like a special show just for us, in honour of our wedding.  The Aurora Borealis were brilliantly lighting up the horizon.  What could be better for the start of our new life together?

Epilogue…                                          Sunday, August 24, 2003

All things considered with our group of friends, we got off pretty lightly.  When we reached our room at the lodge, tired and happy, we found we’d been short-sheeted.  Blair had tried to get into bed and found he couldn’t get his feet past the halfway point.   We had a good laugh and soon fixed the bed.

The next morning, Sunday, the lodge was serving breakfast down a the dance hall for us.  Last night’s bar had metamorphosized into a cook top and griddle.  By 9am, when Blair and I got there, the coffee was already on.  Being a typical mountain morning, the temperature was barely above the freezing mark, hot coffee was just what everyone needed.

The Spurrier’s (including our young harpist) were the only guests not to stay the night, so almost everyone was at breakfast.  Over an excellent meal, which consisted of pancakes, bacon, sausage and hash browns, most people relived the night before, swapping stories of the various goings on.

About 11 am we moved everyone (everyone that is, who was up, a few were still sleeping) through to the other side of the shelter.  It was present time! 

We had a wonderful time opening and among the oohs and ahhs of our friends and family, we explored all of our gifts. 

I couldn’t have asked for a better wedding.  It truly was everything we wanted it to be, and it was very, very “us”.

And now, our new life begins…