With the recent economic downturn, brides-to-be are increasingly looking to craft unique celebrations on a budget. The new edition of Offbeat Bride offers 200 pages of inspiration, encouragement, advice, and celebration of aisles less traveled.
Seattle writer and web phenomenon Meadow Stallings humorously recounts planning her 2004 "freakfest" wedding, and shares anecdotes and advice from dozens of nontraditional brides from across the United States.
Bio
Ariel Meadow Stallings
Ariel Meadow Stallings is the author of Offbeat Bride. She has been published in magazines and newspapers including Modern Bride, ReadyMade, and Seattle Weekly. Her work has been featured by the New York Times, "The Today Show," NPR, and The Guardian.
Legally and socially sanctioned union, usually between a man and a woman, that is regulated by laws, rules, customs, beliefs, and attitudes that prescribe the rights and duties of the partners and accords status to their offspring (if any). The universality of marriage is attributed to the many basic social and personal functions it performs, such as procreation, regulation of sexual behaviour, care of children and their education and socialization, regulation of lines of descent, division of labour between the sexes, economic production and consumption, and satisfaction of personal needs for social status, affection, and companionship. Until modern times marriage was rarely a matter of free choice, and it was rarely motivated by romantic love. In most eras and most societies, permissible marriage partners have been carefully regulated. In societies in which the extended family remains the basic unit, marriages are usually arranged by the family. The assumption is that love between the partners comes after marriage, and much thought is given to the socioeconomic advantages accruing to the larger family from the match. Some form of dowry or bridewealth is almost universal in societies that use arranged marriages. The rituals and ceremonies surrounding marriage are associated primarily with religion and fertility and validate the importance of marriage for the continuation of a family, clan, tribe, or society. In recent years the definition of marriage as a union between members of opposite sexes has been challenged, and in 2000 The Netherlands became the first country to legalize same-sex marriages. See alsobridewealth; divorce; dowry; exogamy and endogamy; polygamy.
Is this FORA TV or OPRAH? Your company is obviously on the slide;First you start charging for "premium" content which is often the least interesting /most conformist drivel and now this insubstansial fluff;PEAK OIL;MASS HUMAN DIE OFF;
US IMPERIAL COLLAPSE; thats the sort of stuff people want to watch;Just look at DIMITRI ORLOV's viewing figures on this site.