 My name is Danny, and welcome to Esoteric Moments. This month in February, I'm going to be doing some theme videos. Brad and I became engaged in December, and we decided to not have a long drawn out engagement, and we're getting married at the end of February. So I wanted to do some videos here about planning our hand fasting and wedding and some interesting resources that if you were in the same book, you might find it interesting. It was a romantic guide to hand fasting, rituals, recipes, and more. And that's by Anna Franklin. This is a nice, smaller book. And it is a pretty decent read. I'd say four out of five stars. This part of the book talks a little bit about historical backgrounds of hand fasting and wedding traditions, and then it goes into some what I think are very generic questions, like how many guests do you want to have, what's the wedding theme you're interested in. I am sure that there are people out there who really have no idea what type of couple they are, how that would impact their wedding thing. And this might be very useful for them, but that wasn't Brad and I. We already had a general idea that we wanted something small. We wanted a really intimate fair, and we wanted it to be outside. Those intro chapters weren't super useful to me. The book talks about how you can call on different deities, the usage of time. For instance, when making a vow, you often say how long that vow will be in effect. And for marriage and Christian vows, it's till death do us part. Pagan hand fastings usually interpret it a little bit differently and say, until love shall last, or for this lifetime, or perhaps all lifetimes, although that's a pretty big vow. And that part of the book I found really interesting, and certainly something to consider while you're planning your wedding. There's a bit about herbal lore and craft in the wedding, different symbols that you can wear, and how that might affect your hand fasting. And then, of course, there are some ritual examples. There is one ritual example from the ultimate hand fasting ritual. Brad and I will actually be using. We're going to have the efficiency in one part, and then we follow up with a few lines. And that will be the part of the wedding where we do an actual hand fasting. After that, we're doing our own personal vows that we wrote, and an exchange of rings. So we're kind of combining traditional American wedding traditions with a more pagan hand fasting. There is a huge list of herbs and meaning, color symbols, lots of correspondences. So if you're into that, you might really enjoy this book. There are some recipes, like little recipes for punch and lulled wine. I think there were like honey cakes and things like that, different aspects you might want to incorporate in your pagan wedding. Generally, this is very nice, but it wasn't a super meaty or intense book. I think it's really geared towards couples themselves that are getting married and really having no idea where to begin or really trying to find ways to make their weddings more offbeat and not as traditional that we expect. If you're someone who is officiating for other people's weddings, or you think you might in the future want to officiate, I'm not sure this is going to be your choice, but it's good, it's fun. In the comments below, I'd love to hear whether you find books with lists of correspondences useful. It's something like this that has a little bit of ritual ideas and more in history, but is fairly intense on correspondences and recipes. Is that your thing? Or do you prefer something that's more theoretical and lets you kind of do your own recipe and correspondences yourself? All right, stay tuned this month. If you would like more videos about wedding, I promise it will only be a month. Don't forget to subscribe so that you can get them all. Thanks for watching and as always, may you find peace in the sacred grove.