A Philippine Slovak Wedding in America

If you are a returning reader to our blog, you will know that the partnership behind this blog is getting married Saturday, May 28, in Sarasota, FL. If you’re a new reader and you didn’t know this, well, now you know as well! I proposed to Ruby in April 2014 in a historic Slovak castle, and it has taken 13 months to get to this point. I’m going to lay out just what type of planning went into this event, and the level of detail for weddings that I wasn’t aware even existed.

We dubbed this a Philippine Slovak Wedding in America: a union of three (unlikely) countries and continents (Asia, Europe & North America) in one location.

The Guest List

Since we knew that Peter’s family would be arriving from Slovakia, and that several of our work friends would be there as well, we settled on a number of maximum guests that we would have: 50. If it went over one or two, fine, but we were pretty set on having no more than 50 people. This would be a large enough number for the fun to be maximized, but it wouldn’t be so large that we’d spend the whole evening visiting 20 tables and talking to 200 people.

Unfortunately, none of Ruby’s family from the Philippines and L.A. could make it, so the guests are a combination of Peter’s family, our friends, and a few of my mom’s friends. The individual nationalities present at the wedding are listed below. We have 3 continents!

• Slovakian
• Philippines
• American
• Russian
• Indian

The Reception

Weddings are a big business in America, so you can hold a wedding in any fancy place you want, be that a hotel or exclusive country club. After visiting several sites, we settled on The Meadows, a golf club in Sarasota. It’s a pleasant place, with a nice golf course, and the people were very friendly, so we think it will be a good choice.

We decided to go with an open bar for the wedding, because, well, the Slovaks like to drink, so that should be utilized fairly well! We had a choice of doing a buffet style dinner or plated dinner, and we went with the plated dinner because it adds a little more style, but I think a buffet would have worked as well.

The Dress

I will be doing a whole article just on how Ruby chose her wedding dress. It was an interesting night, to say the least!

The Flowers…and the Table Setting…and Unity Candles and..wait, what’s a Unity Candle?

There is a lot to a wedding that I didn’t know even existed. When I picture a wedding celebration, I think of: food, music, dancing. Silly me! A wedding also needs to have the correct table setting, which basically means, “What stuff do we put on a normal table to make it look like a wedding table?” In addition to that, we must also pick the flowers for the bridal bouquets and for the tables. When the flower question first came up, I said, “Just pick pink or blue, and we’re good.” Oh how naive! I was shown 5 different shades of blue, 6 different shades of purple, and certain shades of pink that I wasn’t even aware were actual colors. At some point, my head was a turning kaleidoscope. You know you’re in trouble when you start saying things like: “Well, that soft pink will work better with the malibu blue than the dark velvet pink.”

And, yes, I still don’t know what a “Unity Candle” is and what it’s for, and I refuse to google it. It just seems strange to me.

The Cake

Kind of the same deal as the flowers. It’s not just a cake. There are tiers to it. You can have a two-tier cake, three-tier cake, a cake full of just cupcakes (which is called…cupcake cake, which I find amusing), you name it. We went with the two-tier cake, and then had to pick the flavors. I can’t recall how many there were, but let’s just say I heard the word “butterscotch” a tad too many times. I think we settled for a classic vanilla flavor, no fruits, and buttercream filling. Something like that.

Of course, no cake is ever finished without a cake topper! Me and Ruby went shopping at craft stores in Jacksonville for this topper, but we were sort of amused and disturbed by the fact that all these toppers featured couples which were either all white or all brown or all black. I don’t believe we saw one cake topper which was a mixed race. Not sure that is acceptable in today’s 21st century society, but, hey, we got creative and instead found a nice cake topper made of clear, transparent plastic that kind of looks like glass. And it has no color, so that worked for us.

The Invitations

We bought the invitations about 5 months before the wedding from a craft store, and received tremendous help from my brother and my mom, who helped pick a nice font, helped write the invitation, and then diligently printed out all the invitations. It was a lot of work, and saved us a lot of time and headache.

Plus, I think the design we picked is very nice, and it didn’t cost us an arm and a leg. Our initial cost is just the $12.50 + tax we paid for 25 invitations and another $12.50 + tax for 50 announcement cards.

We’ll update this post more after the wedding, which is – but so far, no photos, everything is going to be revealed in time!