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I went to some friends' wedding a couple weeks ago, and they began their wedding-in-the-round ceremony with this wonderful thing I'd never seen before: all the children in attendance entered together, each ringing a tiny bell. The children walked single file in a large circle around the guests, clearly taking their “ringing bearer” duties very seriously. The sound was a wonderful way to call in the ceremony, and it was a beautiful way to honor a whole bunch of children — more than just the ring bearer and flower girl.
When I asked the bride where the idea came from, she said something about getting idea from a Chinese tradition, but it's not a tradition I'm finding much information about online. Regardless, the idea was wonderful — a great idea to steal!
Here's one peek at how it looks:
That’s cool. I’m skipping the bridesmaids stuff altogether but thought a nice compromise would be to ask 2 good friends’ daughters, whom I’ve known all their lives, to participate. I’ve just been thinking about having them walk through our pre-ceremony cocktail gathering ringing big old bells (not little tinkly princessy ones) so as to get everyone’s attention and point the way to the spot where we’ll be.
As a 40-yr-old bride I will be feeling like a nervous and awkward kid myself, so I’m sort of looking forward to bonding with the kids before our respective big moments. I’m thinking they’re old enough to get the bonding thing, while young and girly enough to enjoy the attention. And the moms/would-be bridesmaids get me enough to know why I’m not doing b-maids.
Maybe there’s a way to spread the fun to the other kids at the wedding…give ’em all little bells later, or something.
Here is the site that I took the idea from.
I chose little bells as I knew they would have them the rest of the night and didn’t want them to be too disruptive.
I love this idea 🙂 We have a lot of kids in our family, so it would be a good idea to let them all feel important 🙂
LOVE THIS IDEA 😀
I’m thinking about having the kids walk(or run/skip whatever they decide to do!) ’round the circle as a way to ‘call the meeting to order’ kinda thing.
Either way, this solved my problem of how to involve my 3 brothers, 2 sons and 2 nephews….not to mention all the other kiddos 😉
As a side note, I do believe I recall reading somewhere in my Google-ventures that there is some ancient custom of ringing bells to dispell evil spirits and scare them away from the ceremony…..something like that anyways 😉