Vintage Wedding- I did it my way

Weddings are fun- Aren't they????
My husband and I are both 27. Granted he was 27 when I met him, but I was still 26. In the words of our sealer we "just found each other later in life." I didn't think of myself as an old maid.... at least not yet. But our sealer was partially right about one thing... by LDS standards we did get married later in life. Especially compared to my sister (20) and her husband (22) or our friends who got married three weeks after we did Laura (20) and Ken (21). Yes by LDS standards we were getting old. I don't regret getting married "later in life". I have been able to accomplish so much more then the 20 or 19 year old. After all I have a degree in Molecular Biology, I served an 18 month mission in the Florida Tallahassee Mission, I have been to England and Thailand, I worked for about 1 1/2 years in my field. So yes I have done a lot. I am honestly "accomplished". But that doesn't mean that I didn't want to get married. The right guy was never around. That was until I was introduced to Cory by my friend Kristina, with assistance from Laura. They thought Cory and I would "hit it off" and they were right. So after an generally speaking short courtship (was not my first choice) we were engaged and then I had a wedding to plan.
Now when a girl is 27 and getting married and she is the last of all her friends remotely her age to be getting married- she has had a lot of time to think about what she wants in a wedding and reception. Of course for an LDS girl the wedding itself is taken care of, I had at least never put any thought into what I would want for a ceremony, except that I was going to ware my temple dress and my great great grandmothers temple apron. And of course, any time you share an idea with a friend, "you know doing such and such could be a really cool idea," everyone reminds you that your groom is going to want a say.
So then I was engaged, we were unofficially engaged 27th of Jan. (for those who don't remember, that was the day President Hinckley passed away). I had from then to May 10th to get a decent reception together. Lucky for me Cory was in school trying to finish this semester so he passed all choices on to me. My sister's only advice after she got married was "don't let mom do anything." This was for a few reasons 1-they had had many disagreements about how things should be 2- my mom can have a hard time letting go 3- she stresses a lot and doesn't handle a lot of stress. So in taking my sisters advice, I tried to assign things that were varies people's responsibilities, that way I wouldn't be doing everything and neither would my mom. Well I did leave too much to myself but that was my choice.
I wanted a 40's/50's feel to the reception. From my dress to the hanging lanterns for light, and my vintage cake topper. I knew almost exactly what I wanted. Amazingly everything finally came together. We had a lot of hang-ups on the way, such as having the tables at the ramada I wanted to use bolted down and in the end we moved the reception inside.
The other big issue was the ring ceremony. Cory's family are not members of the LDS church. They are all active Catholics. I can't say they were happy with our choice to be married in the temple, but they were happy for us and requested we at least have a ring ceremony for them to be apart of. I agonized over this. His parents had also requested that we walk do the aisle so they could at least see that. Since there is NO walking down any aisle in the temple I had never put any consideration to this. I didn't know what I wanted to walk to. We really fretted over his family feeling that it was acceptable enough and not being upset by it being a sorry excuse for a wedding. In the end, we choose to add musical numbers to increase the sentimental attachment to the ceremony, also my Bishop officiated the ring ceremony with beautiful words of the meaning of becoming one. His family were so happy with the ring ceremony. They cried and everyone said the nicest things about it.
To dress of the cultural hall, since I felt it was an ugly cultural hall, I created/made draping swag curtains for drape from the over hang. They then hung about a yard away from the wall and we placed lights behind the curtains to illuminate them. They really added a special elegance to the area. Along with the curtains I purchased many strings of light bulb lights and strings of Chinese lanterns. That was the majority of our lighting.
Although there were some things I would have liked to do differently, overall I am really happy with how I did do everything. I took a lot of criticism from all sorts who thought I was doing too much, who thought I was getting too extreme, who thought I cared too much, who thought I was spending too much money. But it was all worth it. The room was beautiful and it turned out almost exactly the way I imagined it. So yes I did it my way, I had my vintage wedding.