A Unity element is the most beautiful part of a wedding ceremony, it symbolizes the coming together of couples forming one unit. Over the last years, unity elements have changed their form from the traditional — Unity Candles or Sand-Blending — to contemporary and modern-day Unity Elements like Whiskey-Mixing and Tree Planting.

In this episode of The Collective Questions: a wedding show podcast, Mckenzi talks with Angie Kelly about unity elements specifically for ceremonies. Angie is the owner and main wedding officiant of Peachy Keen Unions. With her team, she performs customized marriage ceremonies.

What you'll learn from this episode:

00:41 What is a unity element?

01:56 About whiskey mixing

03:51 Modern twist in sand unity

05:05 Styling cocktail blending

07:51 Including unity element in a micro wedding

11:21 Why and when you should have the unity element

EPISODE SUMMARY:

Traditional unity element

A lot of couples come from the background of traditional marriage ceremonies. And within a traditional marriage ceremony, whether it be a church or a banquet hall, often you have become accustomed to seeing a unity candle or sand blending. Once those grains are intertwined, they can't separate them, and the unity candle has a similar preference for background, like joining two flames together.

That's probably what you've seen in the past. Couples are moving forward to have contemporary and modern-day ceremonies because they don't want to do the same unity elements their parents and their grandparents did.

Whiskey mixing

Instead of the archaic unity candle or sand blending, now we're having things like whiskey blending or cocktail unity. They can get intricate. And it's about if the couple has time to do it. In their ceremony, it could be a lot of ceremony space.

Amount of time unity element takes

Angie says, "It probably only takes about three minutes. If you want to pause the ceremony for 30 seconds of silence, you'll see that it's a decent amount of time. So when you're, you have 20 minutes slated for a speaking portion of a ceremony, and we're going to use three of those for you to do a unity element. We're going to use maybe four vowels. And then we have the walking in doubt. Dad might be passing somebody all, but each of those segments adds up in the end. So you probably only see three to four minutes of interaction."

Unity element in micro wedding

The budgets for micro weddings, scenic weddings, they're just rearranged differently. For instance, for couples that are tuning in now, your portion of transportation might be more extensive. So you might have to cut out things like favors or unity elements because instead of people taking their cars, you're putting everyone on a bus and taking them out to a scenic spot. So it's not necessarily that budgets are smaller when you're dealing with scenic or micro weddings, but they are rearranged.

USEFUL LINKS:

Peachy Keen Unions:

● Website: https://www.peachykeenunions.com/

● Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/peachykeenunion/

● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peachy_keen_unions/

Cactus collective:

Website, Instagram, Youtube.