Susan J. Gordon: Will and Kate, Can't You Pick Another Date?
[Susan J. Gordon is the author of "Wedding Days: When & How Great Marriages Began."]
Hearty felicitations on your engagement, Kate and William. Most of your wedding decisions sound great, but your choice of the date has sent me reeling in shock.
Maybe you didn't know that April 29 was the day Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun in 1945. But surely, someone in the royal household might have checked. Sixty-five years later, that early morning ceremony in a Berlin bunker still sends shivers up and down many spines....
Certainly, there are things even future sovereigns can't control, like awful weather or those dreaded last-minute cancellations after you've spent weeks determining who sits where and it's too late to get a refund from the caterer. But you should have no trouble finding a new date for your nuptials. When you strolled around Westminster Abbey, I wish you had thought about some of the great people who are interred and remembered there, and chosen one of their wedding days instead.
For starters, there were King Edward the Confessor and Edith Godwin, married on Jan. 23, 1045. Everyone was glad when Edward ascended to the throne, replacing that wretched Dane, Harthacanute, who had treated England shabbily. Edith's father, the pushy Earl of Wessex, introduced her to the native-born monarch, who thought she was beautiful and bright as well as suitably God-fearing. She thought Edward was affable and gentle, although a bit pale. Most of the time, their kingdom was at peace, and they devoted themselves to religion and early construction of Westminster Abbey....
Read entire article at LA Times
Hearty felicitations on your engagement, Kate and William. Most of your wedding decisions sound great, but your choice of the date has sent me reeling in shock.
Maybe you didn't know that April 29 was the day Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun in 1945. But surely, someone in the royal household might have checked. Sixty-five years later, that early morning ceremony in a Berlin bunker still sends shivers up and down many spines....
Certainly, there are things even future sovereigns can't control, like awful weather or those dreaded last-minute cancellations after you've spent weeks determining who sits where and it's too late to get a refund from the caterer. But you should have no trouble finding a new date for your nuptials. When you strolled around Westminster Abbey, I wish you had thought about some of the great people who are interred and remembered there, and chosen one of their wedding days instead.
For starters, there were King Edward the Confessor and Edith Godwin, married on Jan. 23, 1045. Everyone was glad when Edward ascended to the throne, replacing that wretched Dane, Harthacanute, who had treated England shabbily. Edith's father, the pushy Earl of Wessex, introduced her to the native-born monarch, who thought she was beautiful and bright as well as suitably God-fearing. She thought Edward was affable and gentle, although a bit pale. Most of the time, their kingdom was at peace, and they devoted themselves to religion and early construction of Westminster Abbey....