This wedding was featured on Junebug Weddings.

Grace & Toni met at a faith-based campus group at McGill. Grace says they connected

over the fact that we could talk for ages which we discovered while dissecting a book we had both read. We bonded also over being international students with surprisingly similar family backgrounds, in spite of having been brought up in Nigeria and Qatar. I noticed  how kind Toni was, how comfortable he was in himself, and his sense of humor and love for games;

Toni said “and I loved how compassionate Grace was (and still is), her wit, and incredible sense of style”

When I started talking to Grace & Toni, they had been planning a wedding for some time, and were struggling to find a venue that could accommodate a celebration uniting both of their large families that would be traveling from overseas.

What follows is what we all now know this year: the upheaval of the pandemic, the uncertainty built into planning anything, and then taking a chance and planning it anyway. As Grace told me,

Having to plan during the pandemic gave us the time and space to discern what mattered to us on our wedding day. It was fun (in the midst of the disappointment and stress) to be creative and  brainstorm within the restrictions and see plans take shape. It’s been hard having to miss some of the family traditions we had planned in both Nigeria and India this year. Thankfully our family has been virtually involved in the planning process, but, we have missed their physical presence and support here, and especially on the wedding day, we will miss Toni’s parents and other precious friends and family being with us in person. 

I can not stress enough just how swiftly Salar Events & Design switched gears in light of going into orange alert the week of their wedding (change of venue, disinviting more guests, adding a hotel to get ready in, pivoting and giving away decor etc.) and found a new accommodating space thanks to Yasmine at Cafe de L’Horloge in Rigaud. The vendor teams really pulled together to make this day happen so please make a note of them below! I must also give a shout out to the videographer, Plea, for pulling off technical wizardry in connecting Grace & Toni to their families attending from overseas via streaming services.

It was a beautiful day at the end of September — one of those days that did it’s best to feel like summer — and, well, I’ll let the photos do the rest of the storytelling :)

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