If you’re uncomfortable involving religion or religious ceremony rituals into your wedding, it can be a challenge to craft secular wedding ceremony ideas to symbolize your union.
Whatever the reason for wanting to create a secular wedding ceremony, there are lots of ways to fill out your non-religious wedding with heartfelt activities. Here are a few tips.
Love Ceremony Readings
Choose a poem, song or excerpt from a movie or novel. This is a great way to incorporate important words into your wedding ceremony, beyond the vows. Wedding ceremony readings may also allow you to honor important persons in your life. Your reading can be as traditional or non-traditional as you like. Find your favorite lines that symbolize your relationship and what love and marriage mean to you and your partner.
Sand Pouring
This secular wedding ceremony symbolizes the eternal wedding of love birds. It involves filling two vases with sand, usually sand of different colors. During the ceremony, the couple pours sand from each vase into one larger vase. Once poured, the two types of sand mix and create a unique pattern that makes the sand indistinguishable from each other.
Plant A Tree
Trees offer lots of symbolism for a secular wedding ceremony. They are a living organism that grows deep into the earth and high into the sky. It’s something that is only as healthy as its foundation. Though it can grow big and strong, it can be cut down with relative ease. If you and your partner are nature lovers, this non-religious wedding idea is perfect.
Ring Warming
Ring warming is a great way to personalize your ceremony. It is also one of the few rituals that involve every person in attendance! Either by passing the ring to wedding guests using a uniting ribbon or thread or by encouraging guests to “warm” your rings as they enter the ceremony space, ring warming asks your wedding guests to place a silent blessing, intention or well wish onto your wedding rings.
Wine Box Ceremony
Wine lovers rejoice because this non-religious wedding idea allows you to celebrate your love of your partner and your love of vino. The concept includes each partner writing a love letter to the other. The contents are entirely up to you to personalize, so you can write about why you chose to marry this person, or your hopes for your future together, or anything else. Then, work together to create a decorative box that will fit your favorite bottle of wine.
Next, you’ll select a bottle of wine to store in the box. Alert the person officiating your ceremony that you want to include this ritual into your wedding. Lastly, the box will be sealed and won’t be opened until your fifth anniversary.
Unity Candle Lighting
The ever-popular candle-lighting ceremony usually involves the couple lighting one large candle from two smaller family
candles lit by each of their mothers, representing the merging together of two families.
It’s a fairly simple ritual that symbolizes new marriages. Choose three candles — one to symbolize you, one to symbolize your partner and one to symbolize your new marriage. Often, the last candle is larger than the other two, but it’s not a rule.
Before the ceremony, each set of parents will light one of the smaller candles. During the ceremony, your officiant will prepare a script that speaks to the significance of two people joining together to create one partnership. When prompted, each of you will light
the larger candle using the flames from your smaller candles.
An Ancient First Nations Blessing (Apache Wedding Prayer)
“Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there will be no loneliness, for each of you will be companion to the other. Now you are two persons, but there are three lives before you: his life, her life and your life together. Go now to your dwelling place to enter into your days together. And may all your days be good and long upon the Earth.“
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Wedding Ceremonies & Readings