Fancy Dress Weddings - The Final Insult

 
 
Here’s a tip when organizing your wedding: you know those people who’ve made such a great effort to be there? Well, they have feelings too. It’s very easy to get carried away with the whole idea of planning your big day. Many people feel that anything and everything that’s ever meant something to them has to be shoehorned into the event in some way.
 
This is, of course fine. If you really would like to give the bridesmaids something woven from your (deceased) grandmother’s hair, then go for it. If nothing else will quite do for that church reading then that particular excerpt form Mr Tickle, it’s your call. And if you want to make mobile hanging decorations from your first shoes and baby teeth, the go right ahead. I’m with you all the way. Anything that doesn’t overly impact on my enjoyment is fine by me.
 
A wedding is a personal indulgence and that’s the way it should be but never to the point where you start to impinge on the guests sense of worth, integrity and sanity. This form of wedding torture comes in many guises: there’s the two hour transfer from ceremony to venue, there’s the ten best men scenario and of course the never ending church service. But perhaps the greatest of them all is the fancy dress wedding.
 
These tend to be the preserve of people stuck in an adolescent fixation with Star Wars, horror films or superheroes but the worrying spread must send a shiver of fear down the spine of anyone entering their early twenties. You see, if this trend keeps growing there’s a better than evens chance they’ll have to attend one. And you wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Seeing your uncle as Princess Leia, your Granny as Mr T or the next door neighbor as a DIY Edward Scissor Hands, isn’t fun, it’s ritual humiliation. And if that’s the plan, then I’d like my money back.
 
Fancy dress is great when you’re a kid or trying to find a girlfriend on New Year’s Eve. It breaks down barriers, adds a sense of fun to an otherwise dull occasion and gets the whole thing going. You don’t need any of these things at a wedding – it’s already there on a plate and having just travelled the length of the country to be with you and spent half a month’s wages on being there, the last thing I want to do is dress up as stormtrooper in the middle of the afternoon. In fact, the only way I’m going to emerge from my room clad head to foot in some ridiculous costume is if I’m already half drunk. And I wont be the only one.
 
Anybody who can wear a Spanish Conquistador outfit on Cheltenham High Street at 2pm on a Saturday afternoon without being plastered needs to exploit their wholesale lack of shame for commercial purposes, almost certainly criminal. So there we have it: childlike obsessions should really only be carried out in the privacy of your own home or even better at one of those weekends when similarly minded freaks get together and pretend they are from another planet. Don’t worry you are.