STFU wedding industry.

The other day I was reading CNN.com and came across an article that was titled, "she had a fabulous wedding on a budget". the tiny sum that the lady spent? twenty thousand freaking dollars! that was her on a BUDGET. And she had freaking barbecue. Did you know you can get family style barbecue at the best place in Texas, UNLIMITED for $17 per person? how the hell did she spend $20k?! Because every thing that has wedding attached to it costs four times as much and is half the quality, because you're not supposed to care how much it costs because clearly the amount you spend is directly proportional to your future marital bliss. Clearly.
Since I got engaged I've gone through a few different phases of wedding planning... at first I was planning a fairly traditional affair. We were going to get married in a church, reception in a random (hopefully fabulous) space, first dance, cut the cake, color palette, wedding theme, make it yours while still fulfilling all the customary customs, but put YOUR spin on it because it's YOUR big day. Even then I shocked people by telling them that I ordered my dress on sale, online, from JCrew (because it's just a freaking dress. it's not your marriage). And my traditional-type (very expensive seeming to me) wedding would still have cost HALF OF WHAT THEY WERE QUOTING IN THE ARTICLE!!!! The second idea we had (after I started to lose weight and have ridiculous amounts of anxiety about how to plan an event that is apparently supposed to be the pinnacle of my life, highlighting my taste, creativity, and still be truly US, while making sure that everyone else we invited was having a good time, all with basically no experience in event planning and 1/3 as much money as the average American wedding costs these days) was to elope to Vegas. We were pretty seriously considering that (surprise mom!) for about a week, but ultimately decided that it was important to us to have family there with us. So now we've come to a compromise... we're getting married in a park where we had one of our first dates, with only family and a few friends present. We're getting married by a minister in our church who I've known for several years and who has been a sounding-board/unofficial therapist for me when things were rough. I'm wearing a dress I already own, which I bought on a whim from a consignment shop in DC for $50 because it's beautiful, even though I never really thought I'd have a good place to wear it. The best part is, I can wear my wedding dress again after the wedding out dancing! Hooray! And with a lot of the "required" elements cut out, I think it will end up being more fun. We're also (half-jokingly) thinking about renting a party barge for the afternoon. So the very tentative schedule is wedding in a park, brunch, then barge (including slide!) how fun would that be?
Also, E and I randomly went into Urban Outfitters today, mainly to gawk at what the hip kids are wearing these days (they want to have the thrift store/hobo look without ever actually having to go to a thrift store, I think) and I found a pretty hair band that will go with my dress! And if I'm going to have something pretty and frivolous that I'll probably only wear once, it may as well cost less than twenty bucks. Here's me with my new urban head outfit: