Our Wedding

Alyssa and I have talked before about having a food and travel blog, if for nothing else than to force us to better document our lives together. We finally felt spurred towards creating one when COVID forced us to have a small wedding where we couldn’t share our special day with everyone we wanted to.

Much Love - Chris & Alyssa

The Venue

Our wedding was held in Parkdale, at a beautiful old farm house next to an orchard. There was so much character to each piece of the property, from the treehouse to the stone chimney.

The Ceremony

A few things have stuck in our minds from our ceremony. The first was having family and friends help carry it out (from the music, to the officiating, to the setup, our attendants were in some cases more participants). The second was us brewing tea together to represent the unification of our families. Here is how we described the brewing of tea in our ceremony:

Central to any marriage is the unification of two families. We have chosen to symbolize this today through the brewing of two tea blends into one.

Christopher added a white petal tea, harvested before the tea plant’s leaves fully open. To us this represents the beginning of a marriage that blossoms over time.

Alyssa added a green tea that is grown in the mountains. To us this represents the start of their relationship in the Gorge, surrounded by mountains. The tea is picked in the spring, a period of new life, representing the beginning of their new married life together.

As we gather today at the base of a mountain, to celebrate the beginning of their blossoming marriage, We will drink the tea they just brewed. In the same way the brewed tea carries forward the characteristics of both sets of leaves, our marriage will carry forward characteristics of both of our families.

Photos

After the ceremony our photographer whisked us away to do our photo shoot in the orchard before it started raining on us. We were barely able to take some family photos before the rain came down!

Food

We luckily managed to finish all the posed photos before the rain began. Once the rain did start we had our dinner and cake in the tent.

During the dinner we gave each table a set of trivia questions about us.