Customer Reviews

Alternative Weddings: An Essential Guide for Creating Your Own Ceremony

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book makes no assumptions about your marriage -- the authors don't care if you're gay, straight, christian, jewish, pagan, agnostic, old, young, whatever. The author just provides thoughtful assistance & suggestions for planning a wedding ceremony that's meaningful to *you*. The sample texts are lovely & varied, w/something to suit anyone tired of the same old ceremony you hear on tv.

All the wedding books at my local bookstores gave a plethora of all the traditional wedding hooplah, but there were no books about alternatives to that. I found this book on Amazon and decided to give it a try! It was just what I was looking for. Covering everything from legal requirements to sample vows, to poetry/music ideas, this book has it all, including info on the humanist association and unitarian church, which can sometimes be useful when looking for a celebrant. Unfortunately, I live in a state where there are no humanist celebrants; it would have been nice if MacDonald offered some alternatives to this. A second minor flaw in the book was that it was just too short! I wanted MORE sample vows, and more sample ceremonies, and more contacts than just what this book covered. It was an excellent source of ideas, however, and gave me the permission to think about my wildest wedding fantasies! If you're tired of the traditional wedding schlock, this is an excellent place to start.

This book is an excellent resource for anyone creating their own ceremony. It contains transcripts of an astounding array of wedding ceremonies, from a wide variety of cultures and religions. A very nice way to see how many others have broken out of the confines of the same, tired old wedding ceremony and encourages you to find what is meaningful to YOU. We chose different ideas from various ceremonies that resonated for us; it was a great help in writing our own wedding ceremony and vows.

This book contains a lot of useful information about the practicalities of a wedding ceremony and many alternatives to a traditional Christian ceremony. The ceremonies in this book range from the very spiritual to simple, but meaningful. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to create a personalized wedding ceremony.

I was diappointed by Ross-MacDonald's book. She did provide a fair number of wedding ceremonies of different faiths, but I didn't find many of them to be very alternative. Most of them were the same tired old patriachal, sexist, Western-religion-influenced dreck you see all the time- just slightly different because the faith had a different name. There were maybe eight pages that actually had interesting content. I also did not appreciate the author's use of sexist language or her assumption that all clergy people are male.

The Spiritualist and Viking wedding ceremonies seemed most interesting to me, though I wouldn't want to use either of them.

It's not worth the money! I'd suggest checking this book out of your library, skimming it for the bit of useful information, and then writing your own book.

While the general idea of this book was invaluable - I used it to help plan my own "alternative" wedding - the number of obvious errors in the book became a bit tedious after a while.
For example, in Chapter 3, when listing songs, poems and passages to use in one's ceremony, the author incorrectly lists an Edgar Allen Poe poem and she gives credit to the wrong Rosetti for writing "Sudden Light" among other errors. She also refers to the Convocation or Introduction as the "Charge to Convocation" when it should actually be the "Charge to the Congregation". Also, when referring to various passages in the Bible, some of them are incorrectly refrenced as well. I could go on...
At any rate, if you can get past all of the things that are incorrect in this book, there are some very helpful concepts.

This resource is useful if you're trying to write the wording for the ceremony itself, and not for much else. It provides the basic format and content of weddings for a variety of religious and ideological traditions. Another redeeming factor is the collection of anecdotes and advice from others who have planned alternative weddings.
However, the book's layout makes it difficult to read, and it lacks information about all the other aspects of planning a wedding besides the ceremony itself.

This book is a good starting point for ideas for an alternative wedding, but you'll end up needing other references to flesh out your planning. I bought this and read it only once; I wish I had just checked it out of the library instead.

The book isn't very well laid out, but you can find some good info if you dig through it.

Ceremonies listed include Protestant, Quaker, Unitarian, Jewish, Civil, Religious Blessing, Interfaith Buddist, Baha'i, Spiritualist, Pagan, Druid, Humanist, Viking, Pacifist. Gay and lesbian ceremonies and Honeymoon/destination weddings are also covered.

Besides examples of many different ceremonies what I really liked about this book is that it makes you think about why you are having a ceremony at all. Are you making a religious statement, a family celebration, just getting the legal paperwork done, ect. When you think about why you are having a ceremony it makes it much easier to plan.

When I read the first few pages of this book on Amazon, it peaked my interested enough to buy it. But upon receipt when I had the chance to read through it more thoroughly I found that there was NOTHING interesting or even remotely useful in this book. It has all the traditional vow stuff (even though in the introduction it touts the whole untraditional-wedding horn) and then wierd things like Druid weddings. All the vows included in this book sound similar to one another. Nothing stuck out as being especially interesting.

It was also hard to read. The author included lots of personal accounts from "real" people, and each and every person mentioned had to be tagged (i.e. Dave, 24, brick layer or Jane, 32, personal assistant). It got old REALLY quick and became aggravating to read 50 tags per sentence. Aside from that, each person quoted said the same exact thing: "Since we aren't religious, we wanted a wedding that was different." Yet she never really delivered what I was hoping for: guideance on how to create a personalized wedding/vows.

Even though this book may seem like an economical buy, it's not worth it!! Save yourself and buy all the books the Knot puts out instead...