Wedding breakfast

One of the stranger features of our wedding is that our families will arrive in town as complete foreign entities. And we're not just talking extended cousins who haven't been introduced. With Nicolas's family based in France and Switzerland, and mine in the US, not even our parents have come face-to-face. Having visions of sitting in the ceremony and wondering which guests had raised the groom, my parents were insistent that something be done.

We decided to host a breakfast on our wedding day. Note: this is not a "wedding breakfast," which, in England, is also a thing. We found that out during our venue hunt, when hotel ballrooms kept offering us receptions including a "wedding breakfast." We could only imagine that meant the Brits partied so hard through the night that they traditionally wrapped up their wedding parties with a sunrise hangover meal. Seeing how the Brits drink and how their May Balls in Cambridge do indeed last until sunrise (including pancakes, sausages, and eggs to wrap it up), it seemed plausible. Google, however, cleared things up:

wedding breakfast

noun

BRITISH

1. a celebratory meal eaten just after a wedding (at any time of day) by the couple and their guests.

So we will be hosting a pre-wedding family breakfast, not a wedding breakfast. In delightfully English fashion, there will be scones, clotted cream with strawberries, eggs, English bacon (basically Canadian bacon), tea, and (how treacherous) coffee. Hopefully, we'll all get to know each other a bit better before Nicolas and I say, "I do."

The Antiques Cafe, the quaint Kemptown backdrop over which our families will get to know each other.

As for the venue, we've reserved the place I came to celebrate landing our dream apartment last July: the Antiques Cafe. It's an adorable antiques-shop-come-café in Kemptown, our neigborhood, where the décor is constantly changing and everything you see (and sit on) is for sale. A place already full of happy memories, to which we'll soon be adding more.