Looks like Michelle Duggar is feeling a little nostalgic these days—and who can blame her? Two weeks after watching her daughter Jill Duggar marry Derick Dillard, the 19 Kids and Counting matriarch took to her blog to share some memories of her own "sweet and simple" wedding almost 30 years ago.
The ceremony took place at the Duggars' church in Arkansas, which hadn't even been completed at the time of Michelle and Jim Bob's "I dos" on July 21, 1984. "Our church was still being built, so we were meeting in a big gymnasium for services. We actually got married in the hallway of the building—we had set up folding chairs to use as pews!" she recalled of their vows.
The rest of the special day was similarly low-key. "We didn't buy flowers and barely even decorated the hall," she wrote, noting that she wanted to save money. "Our backdrop was a lattice that we had woven through with crepe paper…I even made my own bouquet using fake flowers so I could keep them to decorate my home with later."
The cake was homemade, too. And Michelle saved money on her dress by wearing her mother-in-law's wedding gown. "Everything we did for our wedding was so inexpensive, but perfect for us," she explained. "We wanted to spend our money on our honeymoon, which was our first time to be alone together."
The couple's humble tastes haven't changed much, either. Michelle wrote in her blog that she and Jim Bob "repeated the same reception style" at their 25th anniversary vow renewal. They don't have a videotape of the original event, but they took a lot of pictures and recorded the ceremony on audio cassette.
"As our children were growing up, we would listen to our wedding cassette again every year on our anniversary," she wrote. "We would reenact the ceremony, show them how we walked down the aisle, and tell them the stories about what it was like."
