Civil ceremonies - personal or cold?

we're definitely going with a civil ceremony, and one of the reasons other than not having any religious beliefs is the fact you can have your preferred secular music/readings/whatever. I'm quite looking forward to being able to personalise our ceremony Have only ever been to religious weddings though, so I can't say whether I found registrars/venues etc cold. My parents have been to a few and said they were lovely - one was in the registry office, the others in a hotel. I have to say, if we were being forced into, or obliged to have a religious wedding that one or both of us didn't believe in, surely that would come across as "cold"???

Incidentally, does anyone have any idea if/when Humanist ceremonies are likely to be legal? I thinka bill is being put to the government, but no idea of the timelines of these things

irishbird wrote: »

yes you can have a legal wedding at the weekend with the Spiritualist e.g. Tom Colton .

Two years ago there was no-one on the list except for religious bodies, but from what I recall, a Pagan group jumped through the hoops and discovered how to set up a recognised religious body which could then nominate their own solemnisers, which was a bit of a coup seeing as it had been a fairly closed shop up to then. It appears that a good few people have got on the list since then. If you check the list of Solemnisers below, you'll see the "Spiritualist Union of Ireland" now have three solemnisers.

http://www.groireland.ie/getting_married.htm#section2

They appear to be more into the side of mysticism and psychics rather than the mediation and enlightenment side of spiritualism, but I'm sure they're probably about as religioun-neutral as you'll find, outside of the Civil registrars.