I’ve mentioned
here and there how wedding planning kind of sucks and how I probably (definitely)
should’ve eloped, but I’m sure that once it’s all over, I’ll be glad that I had
the big Midwestern wedding. Until then, though, you’ll have to cut me some
slack.
James proposed
in June 2012, and we settled on a July 2013 wedding for a number of reasons:
James is a teacher, which would make a fall wedding (my first choice)
difficult. My dad and many of our friends and relatives are farmers, so fall is
tough for them. But what really tipped the scales in favor of a July wedding
was the fact that July 27 landed on a Saturday. July 27, 2007 was the day James
and I started dating, so we staked a claim for a wedding date of July 27, 2013.
So after we’d
hashed out a date, the next pressing decision was where to have the wedding.
James is from Minnesota, and I am from South Dakota. We briefly considered a
wedding in Minneapolis, but dismissed it on the grounds that we’re too cheap
for that. I had been living and working in Sioux Falls for almost a year by
that point – what about a Sioux Falls wedding? Well, neither of us were very
attached to Sioux Falls, so that would be a little strange.
Enter the
lightbulb moment. Why not get married in Brookings? It wasn’t technically my
hometown (my actual hometown of Arlington didn’t have much to offer), but I spent
an awful lot of time there growing up. James was also familiar with Brookings, as
I had dragged him around town on more than one occasion. He thought it was a
nice college down with plenty of character. So we decided that we’d get married
in Brookings.
Ok, now we’d
gotten the geographical location decided. But now… where exactly in Brookings
should we have this wedding? There’s a beautiful garden in Brookings, as well
as a number of lovely little parks, so there were definitely options for an
outdoor wedding. An outdoor wedding is great idea in theory, but the execution
of it was a little too daunting for a non-party planner like me. You’ve got to
rent the chairs and speakers and what if it rains? Almost more worrisome than
the potential rain was the much more likely scenario of extreme heat. I didn’t
want to sunburn my guests and sweat off all my makeup (ick), so an outdoor
wedding was never to be.
We had booked
our reception hall the second we’d chosen Brookings, so there was always the
option of having our ceremony there. But again, the non-party planner in me
balked at the idea. That meant we’d have to set up our little ceremony area,
get through said ceremony, clear everything out, and THEN set up the tables.
Waaaay too much work, so as far as I was concerned, the wedding ceremony had to
be at a separate venue.
Enter the
lightbulb moment, part two. This one was just way too obvious: how had I
forgotten Touchdown Jesus? OF COURSE! WE’D GET MARRIED AT THE TOUCHDOWN JESUS
CHURCH!
Allow me to
explain. Brookings, as a not-too-terribly-large town, doesn’t have much for
landmarks. It’s got the Campanile and McCrory Gardens, but that’s about it…
besides Touchdown Jesus. Touchdown Jesus is a huge Lutheran Church situated at
the end of a block. The face of the church has a gigantic image of Jesus with
his arms outspread: hence, the touchdown. Generations of young Brookings folk
have called this church Touchdown Jesus, and I don’t know about them, but my
friends and I TOTALLY thought we had come up with that name all by ourselves.
No sir – everyone calls First Lutheran the Touchdown Jesus church. Even the
church has gotten in on the fun: the church’s website (I am not making this up)
is tdjesus.org.
James contacted
First Lutheran, and they were happy to give us a place for our ceremony. They
even allowed us to bring in our own pastor – the pastor who served in Arlington
for the first nineteen years of my life is performing the ceremony. Pretty
cool. And you know what else was a selling point for First Lutheran? My parents
got married at that very church.
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