Josh and Rhiannon 's Wedding in Rockingham, Leicestershire

Our Real Wedding

We had such a wonderful and unique wedding at the beautiful Rockingham Castle Estate. We had guests joining us from all over the world, as I am English and Josh is American but we live together in Germany! For so many of our guests, ours is the one English wedding they are likely to experience, so we made sure to include all the major elements of a traditional English wedding - a beautiful historic venue, ceremony, garden champagne reception, 3-course wedding breakfast, speeches, cake, first dance and dancing the night away on the disco floor. Our families are important to both of us, so we tried to include them as much as possible in the wedding. My sister and his sisters were my bridesmaids, his niece was our flower girl and my 3 nephews were my page boys and our ring bearers. Both of my parents walked me down the aisle together. To represent my heritage during the ceremony, my mum presented a Welsh Love Spoon handmade by uncle and read the beautiful Welsh poem “ Mi gerddaf gyda thi dros lwybrau maith” (I will walk with you though the road be long). To represent Josh’s heritage and a tradition from the weddings of his parents and grandparents, his mother presented a German wedding cup from which we both had to drink wine at the same time. It had our guests really laughing with us, as I am slightly taller than Josh do I had to duck a little to reach the smaller cup at the base. Hid dad also read “A Wedding Toast” by James Bertolino, which we felt nodded to Josh’s devoutly Protestant upbringing without it being too overtly religious.As well as representing our families and backgrounds, we also wanted to inject a bit of personality and fun into the day and to represent ourselves as a couple. We even held a hat and fascinator competition to encourage the Americans and Europeans to wear traditional English headwear to the wedding - a huge hit with our female guests!My husband and I are avid travellers so the theme for the day was travel. We hired a vintage London red bus to transport our guests to the venue, our tables names were places we had been together that were important to us with globes placed beside them on the tables, our favours were leather luggage tags attached to little card suitcase, and we even designed our menus to look like passports that combined the motifs on the US and UK passports. My best friend created the most beautiful 3-tiered wedding cake with a world map on it and a ‘fly away with me’ cake topper, and we had a stack of vintage suitcases topped with flowers. For the evening, we ‘travelled’ back in time with our guests to our trip to Las Vegas 18 months before when my husband and I were legally married on the back of a vintage pink Cadillac. We had 2 dancers dressed as Vegas Showgirls surprise our guests by joining us on the dance floor after our first dance and performing a medley of ABBA songs (a big hit with the mums) and hired in two casino tables - blackjack and roulette - to create a real Las Vegas vibe. We had evening favours for everyone as a keepsake too - custom wedding casino chips turned into fridge magnets.We both loved our wedding day and had so much fun - more than we could have ever hoped for. Looking back at photos and videos of the day and seeing all the smiles, happy tears and laughter on everyone’s faces, and hearing such positive feedback from our guests made all the stress of planning it worth it in the end. We will have cherished memories of the day forever.