Vacation Recap: Day Two - The Big Party

The actually anniversary reception was on Saturday afternoon.

Around noon, Shrike and I, my brother and sister-in-law and my niece went over to the hotel to get everything set up.

After much debating about the placement of the guestbook table, and much obsessing about the "random" scattering of the "50" confetti, we had it all ready to go with plenty of time to spare.

The room was beautiful. My sister-in-law handled the decorations, including the cake, flowers, confetti and gold and cream M&Ms in little gold bags - some of which were customized with my parents' names and "50 Years." The flowers were "champange" colored, accented with gold trim. It was all absolutely gorgeous.

The slideshow was projected onto one wall, and looped through the 200+ photos about every twenty minutes. Music from the 40s and early 50s was playing in the background, but not too loudly to intefere with conversation.

The menu included mini eggrolls, tiny pigs-in-blankets, spinach dip, Swedish meatballs, a veggy tray, beer, wine, punch, and coffee.

After about an hour of mingling, my parents renewed their vows, in a ceremony that included all of the original wedding party: my mom's sister, who was her matron of honor; my dad's brother who was his best man; and my mom's cousin, a Baptist minister who peformed the ceremony.

As luck would have it, the slide show that was running in the background just happened to get to the wedding photos during the vow renewal, but we didn't realize it until we saw the photos of the five of them standing there, with slides of the same people, fifty years earlier, projected on the wall behind them!

My "uncle" (mom's cousin) is a bit of a jokester, so he kept it fairly light, but still appropriately solemn, if that makes sense. I won't go so far as to say that there wasn't a dry eye in the house, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't one in the family.

After the ceremony, they cut the cake, and my brother gave a toast, on behalf of the kids and grandkids.

Based on the guesbook, we think there were about 100 people there. The room was definitely full (standing room only, with tables for about 70 set up) but not uncomfortably so.

In summation, it was pretty much perfect.

After the party, we went back to the house for a while, got into our comfy clothes, and looked at the photos from that afternoon.

(Man, I love digital photography!)

That evening, the extended family, including some of my brother's inlaws went out to dinner at a local seafood restaurant. I had gumbo, which is something I don't get every day here in BlueState!