Many people have asked why we chose to get married on Saturday, February 2, 2002 at 2:02 p.m. The answer is really quite simple: We thought the date was fun and memorable!

Amy had always wanted to get married in the fall, as this was her favorite time of year. However, as we were contemplating marriage in early 2001, the time tables of engagement and wedding planning just seemed too rushed to pull off a fall 2001 wedding. Add to that fact that Amy was starting work on her Master's degree in social work at the same time, and it just would have been quite hair raising to contemplate holy matrimony.

We started tossing around alternate dates and times, just for fun. Steve's college roommate Tim Walston had just gotten married in January of 2001, proving to us that a wedding in the dead of winter (and not around Christmas) was doable.

As many of our friends know, Steve gets very "into" the season of Christmas. From the lights to the music and onto what the holiday means to Christians, it's a very exciting time of year for him. However, when the season ends, he's sort of bummed until the next big "holiday," which happens to be his birthday on March 2.

We thought it would be nice to put our wedding in between the time period of Christmas and Steve's birthday so that we would continually have an "event" to look forward to. Sounds cheesy, we know, but when it's the dead of winter in blistery cold Chicago, you have to have something to get pumped about!

Being the marketing-minded person that he is, Steve started thinking about the year 2002. Knowing that January wouldn't work for a wedding date due to Amy's grad school schedule, he said "wouldn't it be cool if we could get married on 02/02/02.... It would be funny if that was a Saturday." We quickly looked at the calendar.

02/02/02 was a Saturday.

At that point, as crazy as it sounds, we decided that 02/02/02 should be our wedding date. To make it that much more "over the top," we decided on a time of 2:02 p.m. (though getting that time to actually work was a long struggle in planning and church politics!). The off-the-hour time was also influenced by Steve's frustration with other events where he could never remember the times, thus typically arriving late to attend. The theory was that people would mentally remember 2:02 in the afternoon

Amy thought the date was memorable and romantic. Steve just loved the fact that it was cool from a promotional and marketing standpoint. Either way, the couple was set to move forward with the day, even though the date posed difficulties from various angles.

The most obvious were winter weather patterns, especially with family coming from distant places. We were also concerned that the September 11 terrorist attacks would negatively impact the confidence our guests would have in flying to our wedding. While we did get a snow storm three days before the wedding, it didn't effect travel that much and we had a beautiful sunny day for the event.

A modification on the general format of our wedding invitation broke with the tradition of spelling out the time of the wedding. We felt that using the numerals would help burn the 02/02/02 at 2:02 p.m. idea in people's minds much more effectively. From the feedback we received, that seemed to work quite well.

One advantage of the unique date in the dead of winter was that it was easy to book wedding vendors compared to a summer wedding, as this was off-peak for most of them (there's a free bit of wisdom for all you wedding planners out there).

In the end, it all worked out. Guests told us months in advance that they were looking forward to the "02/02/02 day." It was fun to build a buzz and excitement for an already amazing day. Ironically, the wedding didn't actually start at 2:02 p.m. Instead, it started ten minutes later at 2:12 p.m. We decided to hold off on the start time when it was reported to the wedding party that a large accident on an expressway near the church had closed the exit, forcing people to be rerouted. This kept many folks from getting there at the 2:02 time, so we pushed it back. The delay in time worked like a charm (and thank goodness our talented musicians were able to fill the prelude with extra music!).

So that's why we got married on 02/02/02 at 2:02 p.m. Thanks for asking!