There’s nothing worse than a long, boring wedding ceremony. The most boring wedding ceremony I had to attend was over three hours long and had way too many meaningless readings done that meant absolutely nothing. It was clear it was like a template that brides and grooms were blindly following. We agreed on thirty minutes max, twenty if we could possibly pull that off, and tried to abide by that and squeeze in a solo by my bridesmaid, a reading from a bridesmaid and a reading from a groomsman, our own personalized vows, and a unity ceremony in the form of a poured cocktail. I think we made it work.

During Chris’s vows, he surprised me with a quote that I did not recognize but did sound vaguely familiar. Who said this quote? He pulled out a Pooh bear from under the unity ceremony table. I love Pooh and was so excited. I knew he’d do something to surprise me at some point during the wedding, and this was it.

We wanted some visual for a unity ceremony toward the end of the ceremony, and we knew a candle would be too boring and trite, and a sand ceremony just seemed pointless because we’d need to carry that back to New York or give it away, which would defeat the purpose of having it. We both like cocktails, Chris said. So why don’t we just get some drinking vessels, pour our own into a single glass, and drink out of it to symbolize our union? It was an idea that amused so many of our guests, and some complained that they didn’t get a taste of it afterwards to see what we decided to mix. Of course, I chose tequila as the liquor of choice.

The readings were done really well — the one by my bridesmaid was chosen by herself, Sonnet XVII of Pablo Neruda, to reflect our bond and love, and the one by Chris’s cousin and groomsman, “If” by Rudyard Kipling, was to mark the next stage of our lives as adults. “If” is Chris’s favorite poem, and I’ve always loved the writings of Pablo Neruda both for his poetry as well as his novels. And the song that Crista sang, “Your Song,” was so beautifully delivered that it made me tear up when she was singing. She definitely put her own spin on the song that is unique from Elton John’s.

“Table numbers are so boring. I want table names,” Chris said to me ages ago. Okay, I said, but you have to come up with a theme that makes sense. A few weeks ago, he asked me questions about what Ed’s favorite foods were. A few that came up off the top of my head included pork ribs, dim sum, mango mousse, and rocky road ice cream. Think up a few more, Chris said. I also thought up Gordo’s burritos (a mini chain of San Francisco style burritos back home), Funyun chips (our favorite junk food purchase at the corner store near our house growing up), Jamba Juice (in particular, the berry smoothies), and fried chicken. “Let’s have the table names be Ed’s favorite foods,” Chris said. “Not everyone will know right away what it’s about, but I’ll tell everyone during my reception speech.”

I immediately started crying when he said this. I felt like it would be another reminder for my mom and me that Ed wasn’t there, but Chris was insistent. “It’s a way to remember him and make him there at the wedding,” he reassured me. “It’s a good idea.” So I reluctantly agreed. And then after having the table names printed along with photos to accompany what each was, I decided that this would be a really fun and cute idea for our quirky wedding.

(What we later found out from discussing the wedding with guests is that some thought that the name of their tables was the only food they’d be getting for the evening. The “Pork Ribs” table wondered if they’d all be eating pork ribs, and the Dim Sum table thought they’d only be choosing from different bamboo baskets during the dinner reception. Boy were they in for a surprise!).

Ed was all over the wedding. He was sitting at the ceremony in my good friend Adam’s pocket on the ocean terrace. When Adam was manning our welcome table, little Bart was there with him, too, and apparently was handed off to a few other friends who took his photo in different wedding venue spots. I had photos of Ed and Ed and me placed at the gift table of our wedding welcome area. His favorite foods were the names of each of the reception tables, and a shout out to him was on the ceremony programs we stayed late at my office printing on the gold Indian paper that Chris’s mother bought in India. There was no way I’d have a wedding and pretend my brother didn’t exist or wasn’t important to me. I needed him to be everywhere, otherwise I couldn’t pull this wedding off and be sane.

We even had some of Ed’s favorite songs, such as Shania Twain’s “From This Moment On” and Mariah Carey’s “Hero played. And what not a single person knew, not even Chris, was that right before my parents walked me down the aisle for our wedding ceremony, I took out a tiny 1″ by 1” photo of Ed when he was just in elementary school and tucked it into the ivory ribbon that wrapped my bridal bouquet. This way, Ed would be closest to me during the ceremony and near me all night long; at the ceremony, during photos, at the reception head table, and back with me at the end of the night when everything has ended and everyone has gone home.

He lives on in me, and we hope he also enjoyed the wedding as much as we did.

The truth is that although I don’t like cookie-cutter weddings, in general I love, love weddings. I love the idea of family and friends getting together to see two people join lives. I love the corniness of “love in the air” and people thinking about falling in love and being together forever. I also love everyone having this excuse to dress up in their finest and get decked out for a special occasion… and taking lots and lots of pictures to prove how good looking they all really are. I am a little brainwashed by Disney and love a happy ending.

But to try to prevent us from seeming like we would have a cookie cutter wedding, Chris and I spent the last year trying to figure out the best ways to make this wedding really “us.” How do we infuse this with the ridiculous and funny, light-hearted but heartfelt beings that we try to be?

Where did we start thinking about this? Well, if you know me at all, we started with the food. I sought out the only caterer of the three preferred caterers our venue was contracted with that would allow us the most cultural customization with our menu to reflect our cultures and our food loves. We had Vietnamese (which exceeded any and all expectations for both quantity and quality) for our welcome/rehearsal dinner, so we didn’t have to worry about that. For our reception, this ultimately resulted in Chinese, Malaysian, Indian, Thai, Mexican, and American-influenced dishes. We had to have a good mix of meat, seafood, and vegetables to accommodate our pescatarians and our meat-eaters alike, and there absolutely had to be rice. And because we’re in California, we wanted the option of tacos and quesadillas. so we made it happen via interactive food stations instead of formal plated dishes. We asked for a lot of customization, additions, and deletions (which, frankly, we had to pay quite a bit for), but in the end, it was all worth it. The food we had at our wedding was exactly like what we ate during our wedding tasting. And for the dishes we didn’t get a chance to taste but totally took a chance on, like the leg of lamb, the chicken tikka masala, and the butternut squash soup with ginger-poached pear, they were even better than they sounded on paper.

I was so proud to have wedding food that no one grumbled about or said was tasteless or worse, over-salted. And since Chris has always been a big snacker, he wanted to have little bowls of some of his favorite snacks, which include banana (plantain) chips, and his Aussie favorite Arnott’s Barbeque Shape crackers. Chris could gorge on these all day if you allowed him to, so we felt this was representative of us. We made sure to have Ben, his brother, groomsman, and MC, let all the guests know during the reception what these little snacks were in the bowls on their reception tables. And our wedding favors were many different flavors of Tim Tams, Chris’s favorite biscuit/cookie, which is also of Arnott’s from Australia. So we sent guests home with these biscuits packaged in plum purple organza drawstring bags with “With Love” labels that had on our names on them that we got complimentary from Wedding Paper Divas, courtesy of my cousin who works at Shutterfly.

What about dessert? We both love tropical flavors, so my first instinct was to try to find a dessert shop that could make us a mango cake. The only one that offered this was a shop that had a very high cake minimum and was hell-bent on using fondant; they were the ultimate cake Nazis. Neither of us likes fondant, so that was nixed. We finally found a dessert shop that could not only make our wedding cake image come true, but also accommodate mini desserts for the dessert table I’d always dreamed of having and having styled in our wedding colors. The wedding cake flavor was not mango in the end sadly, but was still tropical: vanilla cake with passion fruit filling and coconut cream cheese frosting. And because having wedding cake and four different mini desserts was not enough for me for variety, we also hired and got a great deal on a gelato cart, offering flavors that reflect us: pistachio (my favorite gelato flavor by far…with real pistachio chunks), tiramisu (hello, gelato is Italian, so we can’t NOT have tiramisu), pumpkin pie (very American), and mango sorbetto (to make up for not having mango cake). (Full disclosure, the dessert shop completely messed up on our cake design, as we ordered a completely different design and shape than what was delivered, but we’re taking it up with them now. It’s happily the only thing that really went “wrong” during the wedding day).

I researched and hand-picked every single seasonal floral and leaf stem put into the bridal and bridesmaid bouquets, the corsages and boutonnieres, and all center pieces and altar flowers. I loved the plum anemones, the white garden roses, the bright green cymbidiums, and the plum and white lilies the most. They gave a romantic but fresh look to the entire venue that I was so excited about when my florist presented the bouquets to me. She was happy to hear what I wanted, but also very proactive in giving me suggestions for the look we were trying to achieve. Chris said he didn’t care what I chose as long as there were orchids. We had two types of orchids, so he was very happy in the end. In fact, I’m surprised by how much he actually raved about the wedding flowers. He seemed more thrilled with the end result than I was!