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Real Jewish Brides: Maggie on Her Conversion to Judaism

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Maggie will be marrying Danny on 6th June 2021 at Stone House of St. Charles in St. Charles, Missouri. Click here to read all Maggie’s planning posts to date.

THREE FACTS: (1) Danny proposed to Maggie on his birthday! (2) Maggie is in the process of converting to Judaism (3) Maggie is a member of STG Brides Club!

Blogging Bride Maggie and Danny
COVID-19 and wedding planning

The past 8 weeks have not been very eventful. As far as the pandemic goes, living between two states proves interesting when one state is still on lockdown and the other is fully open. Thankfully, I now live in the fully open state, so this has allowed me to find a job after getting laid off due to COVID-19. As a hotel manager my industry was hardest hit by this pandemic and after being laid off in March, my fiancé and I had to really consider what was happening with our wedding planning without my income. Fortunately, it only took 4 months for me to get a job making what I was before, so the budget of our wedding can stay the same.

Planning our wedding, though, has been very upsetting and neither of us really are excited to do it anymore. We have the big stuff planned like venue, photographer, videographer, florist, and wedding invitations, but we are struggling to talk to other vendors because of the impersonal interactions we’re having due to limitations on person to person meetings. An example of this: we cannot decide on a caterer due to not being able to try their food.

We have also run into another problem: vendors that are traditionally booked closer to the wedding date are now sending us emails saying that they are booking up around our date because of so many people rescheduling their weddings. This is causing the planner in me so much added stress that I do not even want to look into this stuff yet, let alone start booking.Continue ReadingContinue Reading

Real Jewish Brides: Maggie on Planning during Covid-19

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Maggie will be marrying Danny on 6th June 2021 at Stone House of St. Charles in St. Charles, Missouri. Click here to read all Maggie’s planning posts to date.

THREE FACTS: (1) Danny proposed to Maggie on his birthday! (2) Maggie is in the process of converting to Judaism (3) Maggie is a member of STG Brides Club!

Blogging Bride Maggie and Danny

Planning During COVID-19

Planning a wedding is known to be one of the most stressful times for a couple besides having a child or buying a home. This becomes even more stressful when you add a global pandemic that leaves one of you unemployed and unable to work for at least 3 months. My heart does go out to all the brides who have had to postpone their wedding, booking new vendors for your wedding in 2021 is not easy either.

We are getting quotes from caterers and supposed to put a deposit down without ever trying their food. Florists deal with technical difficulties for meetings where it’s hard to pull out your Pinterest to show them what you are thinking. Danny and I are big believers in hiring vendors who we can relate to. Thankfully for us we were able to attend some bridal shows in January and met some people from each of the vendors we are looking at. The real event caused by COVID-19 that sent me on a crazy breakdown was having to postpone saying yes to my wedding dress. 

  

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Real Jewish Brides: Introducing Maggie + Danny: How They Met To The Present Day…

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Today on the blog we’re introducing our latest gorgeous crop of 2020 / 2021 Real Jewish Brides! Please give a warm welcome to Maggie, who will be marrying Danny on 6th June 2021 at Stone House of St. Charles in St. Charles, Missouri.

THREE FACTS: (1) Danny proposed to Maggie on his birthday! (2) Maggie is in the process of converting to Judaism (3) Maggie is a member of STG Brides Club!

Blogging Bride Maggie and Danny

How We Met

Well this is your traditional love story, one that your parents could have potentially told. Mine is like my aunt’s, who constantly told me “you will find him when you least expect it.” She met her husband through his sister who she worked with. My fiancé hates how I tell the story of our meeting (no, just a few of the details – the fiancé).

The year is 2018, the month is August. I had decided to move back closer to my family in St. Louis, Missouri in July of 2018. Danny moved to St. Louis earlier in the week we met. The weekend before, I had gone on a trip with my friends from high school. On the way back my friend Abby tells me the next weekend she and her husband planned a trip to a local winery with one of her husband’s friends from work. I agreed to go in hopes of making new friends. Danny was staying with this friend,  the friend invited Danny very last minute. Danny decided to go since he didn’t have anything else to do that day.

We go to lunch where I meet him briefly but don’t pay attention since there are 12 of us and we are at opposite ends of the table. Lunch is finally over, and we all begin to talk. He states that he just moved which is what caught my attention. We discover that we each studied math in college (meanwhile he is an engineer now and I am a hotel manager, not so useful for me) as well as comparing how long we had lived in St. Louis.

Maggie-and-Danny

He of course mentions right away about his adorable 7-month-old niece who he tried to kidnap when he was moving. At one point I remember texting my friend Abby saying how Danny was my type. The whole day I constantly try to stay close to him and flirt with him. Finally, we got to the wine tasting section where we shared a table and even shared each other’s drinks! I knew I wanted to date him after I made a mention of my favorite movie The Princess Bride and he stared to quote the movie with me.

The day ends and he doesn’t even ask me for my number. As we were walking out my friend Kayla and her husband Cameron teased me about how close we were, I mentioned my disappointment with him not asking for my number. That’s when Cameron mentioned he had gotten Danny’s number. For the first time in my life I got the courage to tell him to send my number to Danny. Well he did and 30 seconds later I receive my first message from Danny.

Now Danny loves to argue that he knew I was flirting with him but did not want to ask for my number as he had made friends with my friend’s husbands (yep, I didn’t want to be creepy – the fiancé again). Either way we connected and had our first date on August 21, 2018.  We went to dinner and then got edible cookie dough, we then sat outside the cookie dough place and talked for hours, past when the place closed.

It was a 6-hour date, our second date was 8 hours and our third was 7 hours. I remember coming home after our first date and freaking out to my dad about how I really liked this guy but was hesitant to continue dating him because he was Jewish.

Maggie Danny

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2019 Real Jewish Brides: Introducing Mimi + Andrew: How They Met To The Present Day…

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Today on the blog we’re introducing our 2nd gorgeous bride from our crop of 2019 Real Jewish Brides! Please give a warm welcome to Mimi, who will be marrying Andrew on 7th July 2019 at Hazel Gap Barn in Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, UK.

THREE FACTS: THREE FACTS: (1) Mimi and Andrew met online in 2013. (2) Mimi is a flight attendant and writes her own travel and beauty blog on the side (3) Andrew proposed to Mimi, who at the time was nearing the completion of her conversion to Judaism, at the top of Masada – wow!


How We Met

Andrew and I met online. I used to succumb to a full-body cringe if I had to tell anybody that – but five years on and it seems a pretty common way of meeting, if not the most common. It wasn’t on J-swipe, nor was it on J Date, and that is because whilst Andrew was Jewish – I was not.

We met on the good, old fashioned Plenty Of Fish, otherwise known as ‘POF’. Ok… perhaps there’s room for a mini-cringe still. Andrew is a lawyer and I work as a long haul flight attendant and so between us we were both pretty busy – but we always prioritised our dates with each other, and Andrew took me on some pretty amazing ones.

We spent our first year of dating practically living on the Northern Line, which isn’t fun by anyone’s standards. Andrew lived in North London whilst I was in Clapham, but eventually we realised it would make life much more enjoyable if we at least both lived on the same side of the Thames.

And so after a year, I moved in with Andrew, we adopted two house bunnies who hop around our apartment (people think we are a little bit bonkers, and they’re probably right!) and the rest – as they say – is history!

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A Jadore Bride for a Sundrenched Destination Jewish Wedding in Santorini, Greece

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Jewish Destination Wedding Santorini Greece_0001
In the five fabulous years since Smashing The Glass’s inception, having lovingly blogged hundreds of incredible real Jewish weddings, we have always ALWAYS wanted to blog a Jewish wedding from Santorini (surely one of the most magical places on earth) and today the day has finally come. and seriously guys… this wedding is EVERYTHING.

It’s a destination Jewish wedding that has us absolutely picking our jaws off the floor. Australian couple Katie, who works in PR, and Aaron, a commercial airline pilot for Virgin Australia, wanted a spectacular backdrop for their once-in-a-lifetime day, and so they chose to marry on the sun-drenched Greek island of Santorini. And did it ever deliver! HannaMonika Wedding Photography’s images from the day are just beyond.

Every photo is its own little work of art — and a whole bunch of them could’ve easily been plucked from the pages of a super-glam travel magazine. Take a scroll through, and we guarantee you’ll be fighting the urge to book yourself a ticket on the next flight to Greece. And don’t even get us started on Orriss Films‘ Hollywood-perfect trailer – seriously, Katie and Aaron look like absolute movie stars, and every scene is shot so exquisitely.

We just can’t get enough of photographers Hanna and Slavomir’s style: bright and crisp, romantic and modern. They could not have done a better job of capturing the amazing light and colors of Santorini. The blue skies, the whitewashed houses, the lush greenery of the chuppah… yep, we’re smitten with this one.

Oh, and did we mention that beautiful Katie — who looked so effortlessly summer chic in her Jadore dress — was an avid Smashing The Glass reader in the lead up to her wedding? She reports that she found the blog especially useful for Jewish music inspo for the horas and the procession. So glad we could help, Katie! Now over to the bride…

Jewish Destination Wedding Santorini Greece_0059


How we met

Katie, the bride: We met at a pub in Sydney. Aaron saw me with a girlfriend sitting at a table and wanted to introduce himself without being sleazy, so he and a friend asked if we minded if they shared a table with us while they ate their dinner.
We said fine, not realizing he had actually already had dinner but ordered a second meal so that he could sit at the table. Slowly they worked their way into our conversations, and soon after he was telling me about his friend that he thought I might like. He handed me a card for his friend if I was interested and that’s when I saw “Aaron” on the card and realised he was telling me about himself, haha.
Needless to say I ended up texting him later in the night after a couple of glasses of wine. It took us about a month to finally catch up after that initial meeting because I was being difficult (sorry hubby!), but the rest is history. I never would have thought that night I was going to meet my future husband.

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