Documenting Joy

Wedding flowers, holiday festivities and everyday happiness

I got married two weeks ago on the eve of the winter solstice in a perfect and tiny registry office ceremony in London. The next day we headed to Whitstable, where we spent the week of Christmas with my parents and sister, and our cat, who protested mightily at being scooped into his carrier but then immediately made himself at home in our Airbnb.

For most of the week, I left the business of documenting events to other people. I drove the five of us around Kent in our rental car, perfected my parallel parking skills on narrow cobbled streets, and drank cup after cup of the delicious coffee that my sister had brought us. I didn’t take pictures of the beautiful oysters we ate on our first afternoon in Whitstable, or the braised lamb we made for Christmas dinner. I didn’t take pictures of Canterbury Cathedral, which was far vaster and older and more fascinating than I’d expected, or the ruined Roman fort by the sea where we walked along the beach, looking for fossils and slipping interesting pebbles and perfect spiral sea shells into our pockets. On my camera roll, I have a handful of snapshots taken along the coastline between Whitstable and Tankerton, where we walked on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, a few selfies from the morning of the ceremony, and dozens of photos of flowers filling our apartment in the run up to the wedding.

I’d been set on the idea of doing the flowers for the wedding myself – partly because it felt like it would be a rewarding creative project, and partly because I was struggling to find florists within my budget who would deliver the look that I wanted. With encouragement from a colleague who had done the flowers for her own registry office wedding a few years earlier and a last-minute pep talk from my neighbor Annabel who passed on tips from a florist friend, I decided to get up early and go to New Covent Garden Flower market in Battersea. Cameron came along with me, and together we picked out purple anemones, luscious pink roses and pieces of greenery, which I supplemented with supermarket chrysanthemums and lisianthus, and a few other textural bits from a local florist.

Our apartment was full of flowers. Unsure how well they’d last, I’d bought more than I needed, and as we watched them bloom over the next 48 hours, they felt like a physical manifestation of joy, filling our apartment, spilling over the buckets I’d set out to contain them. Family who had already arrived in town came over for a takeaway and hung out and chatted while I assembled the bouquet and the boutonnieres the night before. I’d had a vision of how things would be, but they came out better than I’d hoped; and the whole day, the whole week, was like this.

2024 was a hard year in a lot of ways, full of emotional highs and lows, major milestones and long weeks of stagnation, so it felt good to end the year on a high. Cameron and I have known each other for nearly a decade and shared a home for seven years now, so the wedding felt not so much like a moment of transition as a formalization of our partnership, a shoring up of the life we’ve built together. The ceremony was simple and short, which gave it a clarity and intensity that I found beautiful. We posed for pictures, we went for lunch, we were toasted by our loved ones, and then, we went back to our normal lives – or, at least, onwards to the usual observation of the Christmas holiday.

This feeling prompted me to go back to Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Wedding Wind’, which in the past I’d always found slightly odd. It’s a wedding poem about chores, feeding chickens and hanging up laundry and checking that the stable door is locked, the work of a farm going on even in this moment of celebration. It feels unglamourous; reading it, I’ve often thought, really? You’re doing chores on the morning after your wedding? Yet this time, I no longer saw a contradiction; the joy of the wedding isn’t outside of ordinary life, or it shouldn’t be. It is ordinary life: beauty, work, stasis, change, all of it together.

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