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Kirsten Jacobs

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Your wedding decor can make or break your overall theme. However, you don’t need to go bankrupt to make a statement.

There are so many household items that just need some dressing up, and they will look spectacular on your wedding table. Think bottles, mirrors and candles. They key is to add variety with different heights and shapes.

Spraypaint your items to match your colour scheme, and add fairy lights for a romantic touch. The possibilities are endless.

Here are some ideas to inspire you:

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What began as a simple COVID-19 vaccination ended as a sweet marriage proposal for this healthcare couple.

Robbie Vargas-Cortes (31) who works as a paramedic and EMS supervisor, was one of the first healthcare workers in Canton, South Dakota to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. His partner Eric Vanderlee, a registered nurse, was one of the vaccine administrators at Sanford Health.

Vargas-Cortes then decided to use this opportunity to plan the perfect surprise proposal. During the appointment, Vargas-Cortes rolled up his sleeve to reveal his arm and receive the vaccine, but to Vanderlee’s surprise there was already tape on his arm.

Initially, Vanderlee thought it was his partner’s way of jokingly showing him where the vaccine needle should go. Upon closer inspection, however, he realised that there was a ring taped to his partner’s arm.

“It just kind of dawned on me and I was like, ‘absolutely, of course, yes.’ It was just an amazing moment after I figured it out,” Vanderlee told CNN.

“Robby got his vaccine – and an enthusiastic yes from his now fiancé. Congratulations, Eric and Robby!” wrote Sanford Health in a Facebook post.

Picture: screenshot from video

After a whirlwind season unlike any we’ve ever seen before, The Bachelorette’s Tayshia Adams has given out her final rose and is engaged to contestant Zac Clark.

The two-part finale of The Bachelorette was, unsurprisingly, dramatic from beginning to end. It saw contestant Brendan leave by choice during his Fantasy suite date, Tayshia send fan-favourite Ivan home and the return of Ben, who was eliminated during Hometowns week.

Ultimately, Tayshia’s heart was clearly with frontrunner Zac. She sent Ben home during their final date because she knew she was going to pick Zac at the end.

The pair then became engaged during the finale episode in a tear-jerker of a scene. Zac proposed with a 3.25 carat Neil Lane ring. Of course, Tayshia accepted and the pair rode of into the sunset in a makeshift taxi.

“If you had told me in March that I’d be getting engaged at the end of the year, I would not have believed it for a second,” Adams told PEOPLE. “But I want to experience life with [Zac] by my side. He’s what I’ve always wanted.”

As if the season was not dramatic enough being filmed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in America, it was made even more complicated when the original lead decided to leave the show a few weeks into filming.

Adams was the second Bachelorette to lead the season, after first pick Clare Crawley left the show with contestant Dale Moss two weeks into filming. The pair formed a fast connection from the minute filming began in June and became engaged during the show’s fourth episode, right before Adams came to replace Crawley as the lead. This is the first time in Bachelor history that a lead had to be replaced mid-season.

Picture: Instagram / The Bachelorette ABC

Food Network star Ina Garten, also known as the Barefoot Contessa, and husband Jeffrey are celebrating a momentous 52 years of marriage.

Taking to social media, Garten shared a sweet throwback of the couple on their wedding day to honour the occasion.

“Fifty-two years and still having so much fun! You gave me a life I could never have dreamed of. Happy Anniversary my love. (What’s up with that cake??)”

 

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The pair met in 1964, when Ina was visiting her brother at Dartmouth University, which they all attended. Jeffrey marvelled at her beauty from the library window, telling a friend “Look at that girl, isn’t she beautiful?”

Funnily enough, the friend knew Ina as she was the younger sister of a friend who actually had a date with her that very night. Luckily, that date did not lead to anything more and Jeffery jumped at his chance to start something. He began writing Ina letters in the hopes they would meet one day.

Months later, the pair finally met up for their first date. Afterwards, Jeffrey continued to write to Ina almost daily.

Ina and Jeffrey tied the knot in 1968 when she was 20 and he 22. They married at her parents’ home in Connecticut.

 

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Since then, Jeffrey has been a major support as Garten’s culinary career blew up with her Food Network show. He often features in episodes, and has become a welcome addition to the show for many fans.

Picture: Instagram / Ina Garten

Retired tennis star Maria Sharapova has some exciting news. The former athlete recently announced her engagement to British businessman Alexander Gilkes, after two years of dating.

Taking to social media, Sharapova gushed about falling in love with Gilkes at first sight.

“I said yes from the first day we met❤️This was our little secret, wasn’t it ??@gilkesa,” Sharapova wrote on Instagram.

 

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In his own post, Gilkes expressed how happy he is to be engaged to Sharapova.

“Thank you for making me a very very happy boy and saying yes. I look forward to a lifetime of loving you, and learning from you @mariasharapova,” he wrote on Instagram.

 

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Gilkes (41), is a close friend of Prince William. The pair met while studying together at Eton College and have remained friends ever since.

Sharapova and Gilkes have had a relatively low-key relationship. They went public in October 2018 when they took a trip to the Cotswolds, but had been spotted together as early as March that year,

This is the second engagement for both. Sharapova was previously engaged to former Los Angeles Lakers shooting guard Sasha Vujacic before splitting in 2012. Gilkes was once married to designer Misha Nonoo, who is known for being the friendly matchmaker who set up Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. The pair divorced in 2016 after 13 years together.

Picture: Instagram / Maria Sharapova

Pop sensation Ariana Grande is ending the year off on a high note. The singer recently announced she is engaged to luxury real estate agent Dalton Gomez.

Taking to Instagram on Sunday December 20, Grande (27) shared a series of pictures of the pair cuddling up and in two of the images, her massive new sparkler can be seen.

“forever n then some.”, she captured the sweet slideshow. 

According to PEOPLE, the pair have been dating since January 2020. They have been quarantining together in Grande’s Los Angeles home since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and made their public debut as a couple in May in the music video for ‘Stuck with U’, Grande’s duet with Justin Bieber.

Grande was famously previously engaged to SNL star Pete Davidson, but they ended their engagement in October 2018 following the death of Grande’s ex, rapper Mac Miller.

Picture/s: Instagram / Ariana Grande

“I do”, said the bride to her laptop. No, this isn’t a dystopian telling of our future in which robots are our new partners, it’s a reality for many separated by thousands of kilometres amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amid the pandemic, some couples forced apart are still going ahead with their wedding day, albeit in a much less traditional format. If you thought Zoom weddings were novel, wait till you hear about double proxy weddings, the hot new trend in 2020.

A proxy wedding or proxy marriage is a wedding in which one or both of the individuals getting married are not physically present for the nuptials, and are represented by other people standing in for them. A double proxy wedding is when both partners are physically absent and two other people stand in for them.

This is legally permissible under certain circumstance in some parts of the world, like if one partner is enrolled in military service, imprisoned or due to travel restrictions. Importantly, this marriage is not legally recognised by most countries as common law requires both parties to be present.

Marriage by proxy was very common among nobility centuries ago. Marie Antoinette married Louis-Auguste by proxy in 1770 and French emperor Napoleon married Archduchess Marie Louise by proxy in 1810. This service became even more popular in the early 1900s in America during the war efforts.

In 2020, it has seen a resurgence thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. The New York Times writes of Randy Nuñez and Sasha Nuñez-Carvalho, who married via double proxy in October while he was quarantining in San Diego and she was deployed in the Navy in Europe.

Proxy marriage is legal in the state of Montana and several other American states, all the couple has to do is sign their right-of-attorney over to two stand-ins who them get married for them and sign the marriage licence on their behalf with an officiant present.

The couple who stood in for the Nuñez’s, Chris and April Coen actually specialise in double proxy marriages. For $675 (about R9910), the Coens will stand in for couples wanting to to tie knot. In fact, business has grown by 400% amid the pandemic and by the end of 2020 alone they would have performed about 2500 double proxy marriages.

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You’ll be hardpressed to find two celebrities better suited for one another than Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Together, the pair make up one of the most famous couples on the planet.

Kardashian has famously been married three times, and her third has by far been her most successful. Here’s how their love story began.

 

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Long before Kardashian hit the big time thanks to her reality show, she met rapper Kanye West on set of a Brandy music video back in 2002/3.

“I met him, I think, in 2002 or 2003. He was recording a song with Brandy, and I was her friend. I vividly remember hanging out with him, and then they did a video together, so I’d see him a few times. He was asking his friends, ‘Who is this Kim Kardajan?’ He didn’t know what my name was,” Kardashian recounted during the 10th anniversary special of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

It wasn’t until years later that the pair would grow close. In 2008, the pair were brought back together to work on a pilot for a TV show called Alligator Boots. From here on out, they were good friends and West even appeared on an episode of Kourtney and Kim Take New York in 2010.

Kim would go on to marry basketball player Kris Humphries in 2011, a marriage that would end after a mere 72 days. She may have been able to avoid this fate if she had listened to an anonymous caller who warned her against the marriage.

“I got a phone because somebody decided they wanted to marry Kris Humphries,” Kanye recalled on an episode of Kocktails with Khloé. “I started sending her pictures of, like, certain basketball players that used to be cool that now they wear their pants all the way up to here. Like, ‘This is your future.'”

Luckily for West, the marriage was short-lived and the pair reconnected during a trip to Paris for Fashion Week in 2011.

 

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“After my breakup, I was feeling really low and down and he said, ‘Just come to Paris and see my fashion show,'” Kim said during the KUWTK anniversary special. “He jokes that he put on this whole fashion show just to get a date with me. So I went there and I stayed with him, and that’s where we started dating. I swear from the moment I landed, I fell madly in love with him and I thought, ‘Oh my god, why didn’t I do this sooner?’ Like, this is what real life is like—love and fun and real support.”

They have been inseparable ever since. In 2012, West released his cold ‘Cold’ in which he publicly confesses his love for Kardashian. At the time, Humphries played for the Brooklyn Nets, which West’s friend Jay-Z owned.

The lyrics go: “And I’ll admit, I had fell in love with Kim/Around the same time she had fell in love with him/Well that’s cool, baby girl, do ya thang/Lucky I ain’t had Jay drop him from the team.”

In December 2012, the pair announced they were expecting their first child and in June 2013 they welcomed baby North.

2013 was an extra special year for the pair. In October, they became engaged in an elaborate proposal at the San Francisco Giants’ baseball stadium that included her closest friends and family.

 

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Their extravagent wedding weekend kicked off in Paris, and included a luncheon at designer Valentino’s French chateau and a rehearsal dinner in Versailles. The pair said ‘I do’ on May 24, 2014 at the Fort di Belvedere in Florence, Italy.

 

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In 2015, they welcomed their second child, a son named Saint, and in 2018 baby girl Chicago was born via surrogacy. Their last child, a boy named Psalm, was born in 2019.

 

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Picture: Instagram / Kim Kardashian West

2020 has been anything but conventional, but one thing that endured was the power of love. Despite all the changes this year threw at us, many were determined to tie the knot with that special someone.

While they were not to the grand standard we are used to, there were many celebrity couples who tied the knot in 2020. Some were lucky enough to walk down the aisle before the pandemic broke out, while others restructured to celebrate in a more low-key and safe way.

Here are a few of our favourite celebrity weddings for 2020:

Tim Tebow and Demi-Leigh Nel Peters

 

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Tim Tebow and Demi-Leigh Nel Peters kicked off the year with a celebrity wedding to note. From their pre-wedding ‘Welcome to Africa’ cocktail dinner in the Cape winelands to their rehearsal dinner, no expense was spared. The couple’s weekend events are all planned by celebrity planner Zavion Khotze.

The pair married at the La Paris Estate in Franschhoek on January 20, 2020. South African celebrity wedding planner Zavion Khotze organised the day. The former Miss Universe wore an off-the-shoulder cowl-neck dress by Davids Bridal and Tim wore a tuxedo by Antar Levar.

According to PEOPLE, their ceremony lasted 30 minutes and was attended by 260 guests. The couple wrote their own vows.

The wedding blended South African and American wedding traditions, because their cultures are very important to the couple.

Brittany Snow and Tyler Stanaland

 

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The Pitch Perfect actress said ‘I do’ to longtime beau Tyler Stanaland in an intimate ceremony at Cielo Farms in Malibu, California on March 14.

Snow wore a long-sleeved wedding dress with a low back for her big day. Her hair was pinned back in a low bun and adorned with white flowers. Tyler and his groomsmen donned black tuxedos and Converse shoes.

According to reports, the bride walked down the aisle with her beloved pet pooch Billie by her side. As it rained on the day, the ceremony was moved from the lawn area to a covered terrace.

Bindi Irwin and Chandler Powell

 

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Bindi Irwin and Chandler Powell said ‘I do’  on March 25 in a small ceremony at the Australia Zoo where they all live, with no guests in attendance beside her mother and brother. Despite planning their big day for over a year, all their plans had to change amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The wedding was a meaningful moment for her family. Irwin’s mother helped her get ready, her brother walked her down the aisle and they had a special tribute to her father, Steve Irwin.

Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi

 

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Almost two months after their planned wedding date, Princess Beatrice and entrepreneur Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi tied the knot in a small, private ceremony at the Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor on Friday, July 17.

They had their closest family members in attendance, including her Majesty the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the Duke and Duchess of York.

For her big day, the Princess wore a stunning vintage dress by Norman Hartnell and accessorised with the Queen Mary diamond fringe tiara, both belonging to Her Majesty the Queen. The tiara was worn by Queen Elizabeth on her wedding day in 1947.

She carried a bouquet of trailing jasmine, pale pink and cream sweet peas, royal porcelain ivory spray roses, pink o’hara garden roses, pink wax flower and baby pink astible. Of course, she had a sprig of myrtle in it as well to continue royal tradition.

Lily Allen and David Harbour

 

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Singer Lily Allen said ‘I do’ to Stranger Things star David Harbour in a secret Las Vegas ceremony on Monday, September 7.

They celebs exchanged vows at the Graceland Wedding Chapel. In true Vegas fashion, they even had an Elvis impersonator officiate the wedding. This wedding location proves popular with celebs, as both Jon Bon Jovi and Billy Ray Cyrus have tied the knot here previously.

The singer went casual with a boat neck double-breasted Dior dress and tulle veil for the nuptials. Harbour wore a simple black suit.

Picture: Instagram / Demi Tebow

It appears Lana Del Rey is ending the year off on a high note. The musician set engagement rumours aflame during her recent performance on Jimmy Fallon’s show.

While performing “Love You Like A Woman” on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Del Rey shocked fans by wearing a massive rock on her ring finger.

While reps for Del Rey have not commented, a source confirmed to PEOPLE magazine that the Grammy nominee is engaged to fellow musician Clayton Johnson. The pair reportedly met on a dating app.

The two officially followed each other on Instagram in August, and have since then appeared on social media together. They celebrated Halloween together and wore matching Wizard of Oz costumes, and Del Rey could be seen wearing a ring on her ring finger in pictures from the event.

Picture: Twitter