Gord and Emily's wedding in Nanaimo, British Columbia

The story of our wedding

As we are unconventional fun-loving souls, we celebrated our nuptials in a dragon-themed fantasy medieval style. Many of our guests dressed to suit the theme which added to the fun and we encouraged this by having a short costume contest at the reception complete with trophies.

Most of the decor was handmade since our needs were so specific and as we both enjoy making things it was a big part of the fun. A number of friends pitched in to help with the crafting which was hugely appreciated. My mom put a lot of time and care into creating the right floral touches.

We chose to incorporate a handfasting into our ceremony to honour my Celtic heritage and had fiddler Pierre Schryer to perform our music in order to reinforce that feeling. Our officiant, James Latour, put together a script that was very "us" which made the moment more meaningful than we ever could have imagined.

There were a couple of unique elements at our reception to make the evening fit who we are. Instead of just doing a cake cutting, we opted to first hatch a dragon from a chocolate egg we moulded with a stuffed dragon inside. A dear friend made us an amazing castle cake complete with dragons and treasure which we cut after the hatching with a sword. We then opted to skip the first dance since we are both terrible dancers. Instead, we did a karaoke song together since we are both singers. The duet went over much better than us doing a boring foot shuffle.