’TIS THE SEASON
It’s summer and that means weddings galore. Judith Timson writes on three very different and very fabulous ones,
Summer is wedding season. I’ve recently been to three fabulous and very different ones, one of which — our daughter’s — I will endlessly replay, detail by detail. When I was a young woman, the height of sophistication was going to a romantic French movie.
Little did I know that a few decades later, I would be in the middle of our own French movie: a delightful one in which a handsome young French academic walks into the Juno Beach Centre, the Canadian Second World War museum in Courseulles-sur-Mer, Normandy, and meets a charming, smart and funny young guide from Canada.
My daughter Emily and her beau Mathias were a match made not in heaven, but in Normandy. Mais
dites moi, what’s the difference? To us Normandy is like a little bit of heaven.
With its giant flowering hydrangea bushes and charming stone buildings, it certainly was paradisal when two weeks ago, five and a half years after our daughter met her love, our large and boisterous Canadian family trekked to Normandy for an authentic French country wedding.
All families think their weddings are the best and ours was no exception. Our daughter and her husband did an incredible job, on a budget so reasonable I thought they were fudging the truth, but no. It was far less expensive than if it had been held in Canada — except for the travel costs of our generous guests, of course.
It unfolded in an old stone country manor with interior whitewashed brick walls. The ceremony itself was simple, charming, tender, beautiful and above all fascinating as we combined two languages, two cultures — Canadian and French — or to be more precise, Normand, and at least two religions. Our family brought the chuppah (handmade by the bride’s aunt), the hora, and the mazel tovs.
(My Montreal mother-in-law came close to making a proud Normandy chef cry when, in an effort to be kosher-style in a cuisine that is anything but, she declared his crème desserts off limits at a pre-wedding dinner.)
The wedding celebration began at 5 p.m. and lasted past dawn. Twelve hours! The tempo was relaxed. So much in the spirit were we that when I limped off the dance floor at 3:30 a.m. and whispered to my 88-year-old mother-in-law, “I have to go home now,” her insouciant reply was, “What’s your problem?”
Like many French weddings, this was a do-it-yourself affair, with the groom’s family doing Herculean work in the setup and takedown, deftly smoothing the white linen just so. My daughter’s new motherin-law, her belle-mère, made all the country-flower arrangements.
The bridegroom’s family wasn’t used to speeches, so as my husband and I rose to speak, one of his family whispered, “We’ve seen this in the movies.”
His family provided l’animation, including a skit by two children, which I and many other adults did not quite get from beginning to end. Our daughter sang “La Vie en Rose” to her new husband, a hit in both cultures.
The wedding feast — after a twoand-a-half-hour cocktail and seafood buffet — included the famous trou Normand: an apple sorbet in a frozen apple served between courses, while waiters descended with bottles of Calvados, Normandy’s intoxicating apple brandy.
The joy was transcendent in both languages. Most of my husband’s Quebec relatives took abundant pleasure in speaking French. J’ar
rive!, declared our cousin Stephen as he rushed up to continue his banter with the bridegroom’s father.
All weddings — all marriages — are bridges between sensibilities and cultures, which in itself is profoundly moving.
A close friend’s daughter was married in Muskoka and to honour her Vietnamese in-laws — who with their four children, had made their life in Canada after an arduous interval in an Indonesian refugee camp — the bride changed momentarily out of her exquisite wedding gown and into a high collared red Asian dress for a traditional tea ceremony.
At another blowout gala at the Trump Hotel, we joked about how enmeshed the couple’s backgrounds were. Both sets of parents were doctors, bride and groom were doctors, and the room was so lit- tered with docs it was the perfect place to faint with joy. A relative of the bridegroom whispered to our daughter, about to be married in France, “you’re the brave one.”
Not really. All bridal couples, radiant with big optimistic plans, are brave. They have to be. Even in the most seemingly homogenous unions, two very different hearts and minds — and families — are frantically making adjustments before that walk down the aisle.
But weddings also highlight similarities, and deeply missing the daily presence of a beloved daughter as she makes her life in France, we were profoundly grateful that the groom’s family was also warm, friendly and large.
French couples must be married civilly. One day before the wedding, we went to la mairie — the city hall — where a charming officiant wearing the banner of the republic turned what could have been a cut-and-dried bureaucratic necessity into a moment almost as lovely as next day’s wedding.
Toward the end of the civil signing, she said to us, in English, “I want to thank you for lending your daughter to France.”