And two become one

"Marriage joins two hands to make one heart."

The unity ceremony symbolizes the bride and groom joining as one. I believe that it is an important part of the ceremony. Adam and I devoted some time to discussing what type of ceremony we wanted to do: candles, sand, rings, etc. We ended up settling on having a unity ceremony featuring sand. We felt that this fit our personalities. We live in a tropical location and we got engaged on the beach at sunset so we thought it would be appropriate. We’re going to gather sand from the location where he proposed (Captiva Island) and get the sand dyed in our wedding colors. So it will bring a little bit of our engagement day and part of our lives in Florida to our wedding day in Indiana.

Another option we really liked, but weren’t able to do at our location was a candle ceremony with my own unique twist. I got the idea at church last Christmas when we were singing “Silent Night.” Each member of the congregation is given a small candle and the candle lighters light two candles in the back. Each person lights their neighbors candle until the church is filled with candlelight. I thought this would be a neat way to incorporate all of our guests into our unity ceremony. After everyone has their candle lit, Adam’s mother would light his individual candle and my mother would light my individual candle and we would use our candles to light the main unity candle. The Scottish Rite doesn’t allow open flames so this idea wasn’t permitted.

-Penny