wedding wednesday: the scottish traditions we incorporated into our wedding

Although neither myself nor my husband is Scottish, we have lived for three years (my husband for four) in a little fishing village on the Scottish coast. Scotland is very much our home: it's where we live and work and would one day like to raise a family.

Even though we're not Scottish, we wanted to pay homage to our adopted home by incorporating some Scottish traditions into our wedding.

All pictures were taken by the amazing Anna Urban!

Piper

One of the things I was most excited about at our wedding was having a piper. Traditionally, at Scottish weddings a piper will be waiting for your guests as they arrive at the ceremony location and will pipe them into the church (or wherever you're getting married).

It was honestly a nightmare finding a piper for our wedding because we had unknowingly booked our wedding for the EXACT. SAME. DAY. as the World Pipe Band Championships. I kid you not. So naturally, most of the pipers in our area were unavailable. Luckily, Pipers of Tayside came to the rescue and supplied an excellent young piper. He was just brilliant!

This isn't really a tradition per se, but we decided to have the bagpiper lead us and our guests from the church to the reception venue (which was a short walk just across a green and past some fields). He piped us all the way there and it was one of the most joyous parts of the day. He was also piping as we came out of the church just after the ceremony.

Ceilidh 

A ceilidh (pronounced kay-lee) is a traditional Scottish dance. Scottish schoolchildren will often have ceilidhs as their school dances, or instead of a prom. It's very similar to square dancing. There's a string band playing and a dance caller who organises everyone and teaches them the dance.

Most of our dancing was ceilidh dancing, although we did have the band play some folk covers, too. One of my favourite moments was dancing with one of my bridesmaids, Ana, to the Lumineers!

It was so fun watching all of our guests dancing and having a good time at the ceilidh. Basically everyone was a beginner, so there was no judgement as we all just muddled our way through it. I also loved having a string band. Our band was Staffin Island Ceilidh Band and they were amazing.

Well, that's all for this Wedding Wednesday. Thanks so much for reading along!