Happy Birthday, Erin (multi-page)

22. Our wedding was a small and simple affair, so chances are that you weren’t invited. Don’t feel insulted, there were only 5 people there besides Erin and I: my dad, my stepmom, my sister, my grandma and my college buddy Sean. We had wanted her father to be there, but he was sick at the time (among other reasons that I won’t get into) so he couldn’t make it. It was a fairly last minute thing. We’d been engaged for a year and were planning to wait until I graduated college to get married, but when our 6 year anniversary came around (1 year after I’d proposed), we looked at each other and said “what the hell are we waiting for?” Neither of us wanted a big wedding and we’d been living together for 5 years by that point. For us, it was really just a formality… we knew that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, this was just a paper that proved it to the rest of the world. We made this decision on our anniversary, December 16th, and barely over a week later, on December 24th, we got married. We set an appointment at this little chapel in Torrance and my parents scrambled to put together some semblance of a wedding reception at their place… cake, champagne, etc. They did a great job with the time they had and with Erin and me saying the whole time “don’t worry about it, we don’t need any of that stuff.” I’m really glad they did, though, because now I have all these pictures and mementos from that day. Here’s a picture of the two crystal champagne flutes that we toasted with, the bow she wore in her hair in one and her garter belt in the other.