REAL WEDDING

‘Just like a fairytale’ - Kevin and Melanie Pace’s wedding

“Kevin is not romantic at all, so there wasn’t an actual proposal. He just gave me the ring one day whilst we were sitting quietly together,” Melanie smiles.

The couple immediately got to work planning their dream day, which they thoroughly enjoyed. Melanie fell in love at first sight with her wedding dress, a svelte mermaid dress with a sweetheart neckline and spaghetti straps which she purchased from Alamango Bridal. It was the first one she tried on.  “I made some more appointments with a couple of other wedding shops just for the sake of it – but my mind kept thinking about the first dress. No other dress impressed me as much as it did.” The couple did, however, come across a few challenges in the midst of all the preparations. “There were a few technical aspects of planning a wedding which we didn’t know anything about, like what sound and light equipment we needed for the reception. Keeping our guest list to the targeted number was also quite a task!” Kevin says.

For some quality bonding time with her friends, the bride-to-be had two hen’s parties. The first was a trip to the Aeolian Islands with her sister, her brother’s wife, her brother’s girlfriend, and two close friends; the second, a day by the pool, with drinks and finger food for all her friends. Kevin and the boys had a similar celebration as well; they rented a different farmhouse with a pool where they could relax and enjoy the last days of bachelorhood.

Finally the long-awaited day arrived and the Paces exchanged vows on the evening of September 26, 2015 at the Oratory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Mosta, a place where Kevin used to frequent when he was young. The wedding party then headed to the Xara Lodge in Rabat, which Kevin and Melanie had set their hearts on after seeing pictures of it on Facebook. It lived up to every single one of their expectations. “The venue itself was as beautiful as we imagined and we loved the way it was decorated. Kevin proved he had a romantic side after all – he set up a guest table himself, with a picture from our pre-wedding photo shoot! Plus, the atmosphere created by Versatile Band was impeccable. I had really been looking forward to seeing them in action because I knew they would rock the stage! Ludwig and Pamela Bezzina, together with Paul from Versatile sang Xemx and called us up to dance with them,” Melanie says.

Instead of souvenirs, Melanie and Kevin opted to give a generous donation to Puttinu Cares, adding a small gift box with different flavours of chocolate perlini along with the thank-you bookmarks from the organisation for their guests. The drinks kept flowing and the guests kept dancing well into the early hours of the morning. “The day after the wedding, I received messages from people telling me they left the party at 5.30 in the morning!” Melanie recalls.

The Paces organised everything themselves, down to the last detail, but decided to hire a wedding co-ordinator for the day of the wedding, in order to supervise the food and drink at the reception and make sure that everything was perfectly timed – and it certainly was. “It was just like a fairytale and it passed like a dream. Whenever I look at the pictures now, I just want to do it all over again!”