A new chapter
Yesterday, we made a very big announcement at Southern Weddings: that the tenth-anniversary issue will be the last for our team. Among many other things, I’m thankful that the site will remain active as an archive, and also that the Joyful Wedding Planner (which I co-wrote!) is still available in limited quantities. You can read much more on the Southern Weddings blog as well as Lara’s blog, and I’d encourage you to do so! Here, though, I wanted to take a little bit of a different take, and share a bit more about what this change means to me. For a very long time – long before I worked at Southern Weddings – I have been a person defined by weddings. I wrote about weddings here on Em for Marvelous from the beginning. I interned for a wedding magazine in college. I began subscribing to Martha Stewart Weddings in seventh grade. When I was five, one of my favorite hobbies was sneaking into our church’s balcony with my Mom to watch wedding ceremonies unfold. I’ve had a hand — sometimes very heavy, sometimes just the lightest touch — in pretty much every friend and family member in my life who has gotten married in the last fifteen years, and each time it has been a joy! I have always thought there are few things more magical than a wedding day, and nothing in the last ten years has convinced me otherwise. So to say serving as the Creative Director of Southern Weddings for the last nine years was a dream job is a little bit of an understatement. It has been one of the greatest joys of my life, and truly the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I feel incredibly, incredibly lucky that this actually happened to me. It just