A Leap Day atheist wedding with board games

atheist game night wedding Daniel Fugaciu Photography21 alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride) — Photos by Daniel Fugaciu Photography

Offbeat partners: Valerie & David

Date and location: 2/29/2020 at Collingswood Grand Ballroom, Collingswood, NJ

Our Leap Day atheist wedding at a glance:

We were a 99% match on a dating app and have been lucky in love ever since. When selecting a date we saw that 2/29/20 was a Saturday and knew that was the right date for us to take the Leap! We decided on a game night theme, as it's our favorite activity that we share with family and friends. We included references to Leap Day in popular culture as much as we could. On our wedding website we added old postcard illustrations showing women proposing to men as a Leap Day tradition, and on our Save the Dates we included a quote from 30 Rock: “Real Life is for March!” Little did we know real life would bring a pandemic after our wedding. We really are the luckiest couple.

atheist game night wedding Daniel Fugaciu Photography7 alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)

atheist game night wedding Daniel Fugaciu Photography3 alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)

Tell us about the Leap Day atheist wedding ceremony:

We made use of Offbeat Wed quite a bit for help with our ceremony and vows. We wanted to incorporate how we had been raised (Episcopalian and Jewish), but as atheists we wanted to keep the religious elements to a minimum and just focus on celebrating cultural elements that meant a lot to both of us. We started out with “Whoever you are, wherever you're from, whatever you believe, and whomever you love, you are welcome here.”

Our script also included thoughts on Leap Day: “As writer Vera Nazarian wrote, ‘Today is an ephemeral ghost… A strange amazing day that comes only once every four years. For the rest of the time it does not ‘exist.' In mundane terms, it marks a ‘leap' in time, when the calendar is adjusted to make up for extra seconds accumulated over the preceding three years due to the rotation of the earth. A day of temporal tune up! But this day holds another secret—it contains one of those truly rare moments of delightful transience and light uncertainty that only exist on the razor edge of things, along a buzzing plane of quantum probability… A day of unlocked potential. Will you or won't you? Should you or shouldn't you? Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!'”

We also used “leap” references in our readings:

“Today, I plan to take the leap. No matter that my heart beats a little fast, my knees feel a bit shaky, or my voice quivers. Today, I plan to take the leap that will launch me on the right path.”

“Love is always a leap into the unknown. You can try to control as many variables and understand a situation as you can, but you're still jumping off a cliff and hoping that someone catches you.”

We did a sand ceremony into an hourglass (and had small hour glass timers on each table) and used the quote: “…there's something about you. Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.”

atheist game night wedding Daniel Fugaciu Photography9 alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)

Here are our vows:

“I, Valerie, take you, David to be my partner.
I pledge myself this day to trust and appreciate you.
I promise to respect and cherish your uniqueness
and to support, comfort and strengthen you through life’s joys and sorrows.
I promise to build a life together based upon mutual concern, compassion and honor.
I will be faithful and loving, in good times and in bad, from this day forward. “

“In the presence of our family and friends, I David choose you Valerie to be my spouse,
to have and to hold from this day forward,
secure in the knowledge that you will be my constant friend,
my faithful partner in life, and my true love.
I give you this ring as a sign of the commitment I have made to you.”

We ended with, “No one but you can declare yourselves married. You have begun it here today in speaking your vows before your family and friends, and you will do it again in the days and years to come, standing by each other, sharing the highs and lows of life.” Then, we broke the glass.

atheist game night wedding Daniel Fugaciu Photography11 alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)

Tell us about the board games at the Leap Day atheist wedding reception:

We were lucky enough to find the West Philadelphia Orchestra via Offbeat Wed by searching Philly tagged posts. They were incredible. It was exactly what the groom and father of the bride were hoping for – a klezmer band to get the party going. The Hora could have gone on for hours! They were so energetic and really got the room moving.

Each of our table centerpieces included a small hour glass and small game board boxes. Our envelope boxes were giant dice boxes. Our place cards were designed to look like playing cards. A friend gifted us a custom Connect Four with our names, and our wedding party gifted us a custom Monopoly game designed around our lives.

atheist game night wedding Daniel Fugaciu Photography20 alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)

atheist game night wedding Daniel Fugaciu Photography14 alternative wedding ideas from Offbeat Wed (formerly Offbeat Bride)

What was the most important lesson you learned from your atheist game night wedding?

Don't overwork yourself! Allow time the week of for things to go wrong or take longer than expected. If we had to do it all over again we would get a lot more sleep the night before rather than working on last minute tasks. Knowing when to ask for help is tough, but you can trust those around you.