So after sleeping for 16 hours, and then laying on the couch for the rest of the day after I got up and staring at the ceiling, I think I have finally recovered from the wedding. I know that as Americans we like to think we are on the leading edge of everything. But speaking as someone whose brother just married into a Polish family, when it comes to wedding receptions, we Americans have NOTHING on the rest of the world!

That was absolutely The Most Fun I have ever had at a wedding reception, and I only wish I had known just how much physical endurance it was going to require of me, so that I could have been preparing for it with a very strict training regimen over the past year.

By Hour Four of the reception the Americans had started to drop like flies. (This was also the time that the bride’s family announced that they were bringing in more food, and now I know why-they were only just getting started on their celebrating!) By Hour Five you could find us draped over various comfortable pieces of furniture in the lobby, or “The Recovery Room”, as we were then calling it.

By Hour Seven And A Half (which, incidentally, is longer than I stayed at my own wedding reception) almost the only representatives left on the groom’s side were me, my husband, my mom, and my dad. At this point the bride came out to The Recovery Room to find us, because her new groom was out there recovering with us. As we watched in near-catatonic awe as the DJ cranked up the music and all the remaining guests began some seriously high-energy dancing, she began telling us about her cousin’s wedding reception, which apparently lasted for 12 hours and included breakfast at 4 am.

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that,” said my brother, massaging his temples. (He was already having to ice his knee, an injury sustained when he and my dad leaped into action to put out The Centerpiece Fire.)  Apparently there is a special name for the second day of a Polish wedding reception, and while no one could give us an exact translation, the general gist of it is something like, “Even better!”

The reception itself went well past Hour Eight (and that was after a 1 hour Blessing of the Couple ceremony, 1 hour of pictures at the church, and 1 hour of the actual wedding itself), but by that time my husband and I had reached The End Of Our Celebrating Abilities and were asleep. I’m not entirely sure just exactly how long the festivities lasted, but I do know that they had concluded by the time we all met for breakfast the next day at 8:30 am.

So we all went and had our own “Even Better” celebration at the Cracker Barrel. And while we were probably unsettling the balance of the Universe by having so many of our own manically-energized family members together in one physical location, that’s a story for another blog post.