Catholic Ceremony with a Traditional Vietnamese Dress (Ao Dai)

I'm so excited to finally start blogging and share all the details with you about the best day of our lives! This is the first of many upcoming wedding posts. I'm going to start with the very last event during the week of our wedding - the Catholic ceremony. Don't mind the clarity of the photos. Neither of us had cameras so I am using photos from family members.

Since Khanh is from Vietnam and was raised in the Catholic church, we opted to have a Priest perform a Catholic ceremony the Monday after our traditional Christian ceremony (more on that later). We chose to have this ceremony while his parents were still in the U.S. because it was such a meaningful event to my mother-in-law. I wore a traditional Vietnamese dress, called an Ao Dai, that my mother-in-law actually made and brought with her from Vietnam. That was so special!

We opted not to have the traditional Catholic wedding since we got married two days prior. Instead, the Priest blessed our marriage in the Catholic church. He sprinkled Holy Water on our rings.

The Priest is Vietnamese as well, so he translated parts of the ceremony for my in-laws. That was extra special for them and the smile on my mother-in-laws face was absolutely priceless. We exchanged our vows and our first kiss as husband and wife (in the Catholic church.)

Ice cream was next up on our agenda that night! My in-laws each ordered a medium twist and were shocked at the size. That didn't stop them from eating it - cone and all! But first, we had to take a picture of us leaving the ceremony, which is a Vietnamese tradition.

Thank you to all of our family and friends that came to our very special Catholic wedding ceremony. Also a very special thank you to Khanh's dad and host-mom for being our witnesses.

I’m glad that we agreed to have two ceremonies and, if I could, I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat! 

Here's a bonus picture for you! This is the entire Ao Dai. The hat is a little too tight on my head and hurts which is why I wasn't wearing it for all the pictures. We were in such a rush that we didn't get any good pictures with the entire outfit.