We highly recommend Peggy Lewis as a wedding officiant. We cannot say enough good things about her.
We live in New York and had a destination wedding on Sanibel Island, so we had to research our offficiants online and do everything over the ph...one. We researched a number of officiants before deciding on Peggy. Far too many (frankly, all but Peggy) were just too by-the-numbers. It was all about doing a generic ceremony. Peggy is anything but generic.
To start, she gives you a questionnaire to fill out where she asks you questions about how you met, what you love about each other, things like that. Each of you fills out the questionnaire separately without sharing with the other, and then sends it back to Peggy. She then builds the ceremony around your answers, liberally quoting everything you wrote. Doing that made the ceremony incredibly personal and unique to us.
Peggy also provided us numerous quotes from musicians, poets, philosophers and religious people and texts and asked us to pick any we felt spoke to us. She then wove those into the ceremony as well.
She even offered us fantastic suggestions for the ceremony. She suggested we do the sand ceremony, which we did. And she suggested that she should stand off to the side from us, rather than in between us, as is common in most ceremonies. As a result, all the pictures of us during the ceremony were just of us, not us and the officiant. Peggy really knows her stuff.
All that, and Peggy is just an incredibly good writer. I’m a good writer myself, and do a lot of writing for a living, so I know what it means to be a good writer. And that is Peggy. She will weave everything together to make for a beautiful ceremony.
And a few days before the ceremony, when we had our final prep call with her, she gave us the best advice. She told us to take some time for us the morning of our wedding – go for a walk on the beach or sit at a café and have a cup of coffee. Once the day’s events start, there’s no time to be alone with each other. It was wonderful advice that we’ve since shared with others we know are getting married.
Peggy made our wedding ceremony so personal and so genuine. Our families and friends still comment on how wonderful the ceremony was. We cannot recommend her enough. She is worth EVERY penny.