The Morning Of, Hour by Hour
Ask a couple afterwards which part of the day they would live again and a surprising number say the morning. Not the ceremony, not the dancing: the hours before any of it, in a room with the people closest to them, with everything still ahead. It is also the stretch of the day most often planned badly, which is a pity, because almost everything that makes it better is free.
The shape of a morning
Wedding mornings vary enormously in length and hardly at all in shape. They begin slowly and quietly, build through a long middle stretch of hair and make-up that always takes longer than the schedule says, tighten sharply in the last half hour, and end with a sudden departure. That arc is worth knowing, because each part wants something different from you.
The single most common mistake is treating the morning as one undifferentiated block of waiting. It is not. It has a beginning that is worth protecting, a middle that is worth being sociable in, and an end that goes faster than anyone expects.
The first hour: quiet
The first hour is the only genuinely private part of the day. Coffee, curtains open, dress hanging somewhere, a room not yet full of people. Whatever you can do to keep this hour small is worth doing.
Photographically it is the softest light of the morning and the softest mood. If there is anyone you want a real photograph with, rather than a picture of, this is when to have them near you. A parent sitting on the end of a bed in a dressing gown at seven in the morning is a very different photograph from the same parent at the reception.
The room you get ready in
This matters more than almost anything else in the morning, and it is decided months earlier when somebody books accommodation. A room with a large window and pale walls will make everything easier. A room with heavy curtains, dark furniture and a single overhead light will not.
Two habits help enormously in any room:
- Turn the overhead light off. Window light on its own is nearly always better, and mixing the two makes skin tones go strange.
- Set up hair and make-up beside the window. Facing it, not with backs to it.
- Move the clutter to one side. Suitcases, shopping bags, breakfast trays. One designated messy corner is all it takes.
- Hang the dress somewhere with light on it. Not on the back of a bathroom door.
The middle stretch
This is the long part, and it is more sociable than people expect. It is also where the schedule quietly slips. Hair and make-up for a group nearly always runs over, and the person who goes last is the person most likely to be rushed.
Two practical points. First, whoever is getting into the most complicated outfit should not be last in the chair. Second, someone should be responsible for food and water, because a long morning with nothing but coffee shows on faces by mid-afternoon.
South African summer mornings add heat to this, and a room without air conditioning by the middle of the morning is uncomfortable for everybody and hard on make-up. Winter has the opposite issue: the light is beautiful and short, so a late start eats into it.
The last half hour: dressing
Everything compresses here. Dressing itself is quick, but it is preceded by a scramble of shoes, jewellery, buttons, a missing earring and somebody being sent back to another room.
The frames people care about most tend to live in this half hour, and they are almost always about other people rather than about you: a mother doing up a row of buttons, a sister kneeling to fix a hem, a father seeing his child dressed for the first time. Leaving space for those to happen slowly, rather than in a rush at the door, is the difference between a memory and a blur.
A practical note that costs nothing: put the small things in one place the night before. Rings, cufflinks, earrings, a handkerchief, the vows. Photographs of those are usually made in the morning, and a hunt for a missing box eats the calm out of a room quickly.
Letters, gifts and the moments between
Many couples exchange something on the morning, a letter or a small gift, and it lands differently at this hour than at any other. Reading a letter in a quiet room before anything has happened tends to produce the most unguarded expression of the entire day.
If you plan to do this, do it somewhere with a window and without an audience. And do it before make-up is finished rather than after, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who has watched it happen.
Leaving the room
The last two minutes are worth naming because they are so often lost. The room empties, somebody calls that the cars are here, and everybody goes. Then there is the walk out, the pause on a staircase, the car door, the drive.
Those in-between minutes are frequently the strongest frames of the morning, precisely because nobody is thinking about them. Building even five spare minutes into the plan before departure gives them room to exist instead of being run through.
A calm morning does not happen by accident, but it also does not need a spreadsheet. Keep the first hour small, open the curtains, turn the overhead light off, put the little things in one place the night before, and leave more room at the end than seems necessary. The pictures will follow from that, and so, more importantly, will the rest of the day.
