I'm getting married in 437 days.

I had to take some deep breaths after typing that sentence. Don't get me wrong; I'm really looking forward to being married. But even this far out, the concept of planning and executing a wedding seems monumentally overwhelming. Budgets, venues, caterers, liquor licenses, dresses, flowers, travel arrangements -- I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

My future father-in-law suggested we just elope. While I'll admit the idea of slipping off to Las Vegas or Hawaii or Bora Bora had some momentary appeal (so easy! so low key! so laid back!), the truth is I'm not really easy or low key or laid back -- and any thoughts of intimate beachfront ceremonies were quickly brushed aside by images of a big party with all our friends and loved ones around us, drinking and dancing and bickering.

With elopement off the table, we're left with all kinds of other decisions to make (and by "we," I mean "mostly me"): Offbeat or traditional? Indoors or outdoors? Sit-down dinner or buffet? How do we celebrate our marriage in a way that combines our collective mishmash of cultural and religious backgrounds (Irish Catholic, Jewish and agnostic)? How do we make it fun? How do we make it represent us?

I was talking to a family friend last weekend who told me how she'd clipped the weekly 40-percent-off-one-item Michael's coupon out of the paper and gone to the craft chain every single week in the months leading up to her wedding, each week purchasing the same square vase, until she had one for every table at her reception. My cousin Ian had karaoke at his rain-soaked, beer-fueled Salcha wedding. Friends who married at Arctic Valley a couple of summers ago had hand-painted watercolor pins for each guest, made by a relative. When my future cousin-in-law got married this winter in Florida, she and her mother and arranged dozens of different-shaped vases, creating this amazing glass landscape in the reception hall. We went to one last summer in Vermont at which the couple was escorted from the ceremony site by a New Orleans jazz band while the guests sprinkled the wedding party with lavender.

All of which makes me feel a little bit queasy. Not because I don't like any of those ideas, but because there's a little something I like about all of them. And because I'm having a hard time believing I'll ever be able to embrace the level of dedication it would require to be the kind of person who would go back to the craft store week after week after week to buy the perfect vase over and over, or to commit to the unusual, or to find the individual touches that sum us up as a couple in just the right way.

I know: A wedding is just a party. A marriage is a lifetime. But I want to find the absolutely perfect way to kick off that lifetime.

So I'll approach planning a wedding the same way I approach any major task: By making some lists, getting organized, and then panicking over eleventh-hour changes. By drinking copious amounts of wine and taking the occasional Xanax. By making it as much fun as I possibly can for myself, my fiancé and the people who will be dragged down this new path along with us. And, of course, by writing about it.

Welcome to Wedding Wednesdays. Look for a new update on our wedding-planning journey here every Wednesday, and feel free to weigh in with your own wedding stories, ideas and advice.

Contact Maia Nolan at maia(at)alaskadispatch.com.