Caroline Jackson

I always like to make my wedding ceremonies different from everybody else because I believe that when people go to a wedding, the ceremony should be remembered. Everybody can always remember reception and speeches and everything else, but very few people can ever tell you about a ceremony. So I like to make my ceremonies memorable, and by doing that I do a lot of different things. I do one called “pledge to enjoy” where I get all the guests to stand and I get them to raise their right hands and I say, “Please repeat after me. I promise I will have a good day. I will have a glass of champagne to celebrate. I will talk to old friends, make new friends, have a thoroughly good time and go home with fabulous memories.” Everybody always loves that one because it’s a good icebreaker. Other things, I can do what we call hand-fasting, which is where the expression “tying the knot” comes from, where the couple’s hands are tied together and in a knot. And that’s how people used to get married prior to getting married in churches. And that’s why it’s called “tying the knot”.

Other ceremonies we can do, we can do what we call a sand ceremony, where different coloured sands are blended together. And the idea is that when the grains of sand are together, they can never be separated, and neither can the couple. Other ceremonies you can do would be a “lovelock” ceremony. We get two little padlocks, we lock them together and then we throw the key away, so they’re locked together forever.

Other things you can do is, we can do a warming of the rings, where we get their wedding rings, we’ll pop them in a little bag and we pass them around all the family and friends and by the time they’ve been around everybody, they come back to the front with everybody’s love and good wishes in there. So there’s lots of different ceremonies you can do, and that always makes it memorable. And I believe that’s very important.