It’s not often bridesmaids get to choose their own outfit for the wedding, let alone be given carte blanche to pick whatever they want.
Christina Meador won the maid of honour jackpot when her older sister, the bride, gave her exactly that - complete freedom to wear whatever she wanted for the wedding, knowing she was on a budget and not big on formal dresses that would likely only get one wear.
So Meador went the unconventional route - with her sister’s approval.
Last July, Meador messaged her sister, Deanna Adams and joked: “I think I found my bridesmaids outfit, I get to choose for myself right?”
“Yup!” Adams texted back. What followed was an image of a giant T-Rex costume.
Adams responded with a “LMFAO” and “Yas” to the outrageous wedding outfit.
Meador, who is from Texas, continued to poke fun at her sister over the following months with different weird outfits, but ended up purchasing a formal dress from Goodwill.
“(I) wasn’t actually invested in the idea of wearing something odd,” Meador told CTVNews.ca over Facebook. In fact, she ended up purchasing the dinosaur outfit simply as a gift for her sister. When she arrived for the wedding in Nebraska, she teased her sister about wearing it.
“She was all about it. I tried several times to let her change her mind,” Meador said. “But she didn’t.”
A little over a year after Meador first joked about the costume, a photo of the intimate wedding went viral after she posted it on Facebook with the caption: “When you’re maid of honor and told you can wear anything you choose...I regret nothing”.
The photo of the small backyard wedding showed the wedding party in the middle of the ceremony, with Meador standing next to the bride, holding a bouquet of flowers - in a T-Rex costume that towered over everyone.
Meador’s dinosaur apparently brought a date or had a relative in attendance: wedding photographer Andrea Nuxoll posted additional photos of the wedding on her Instagram, with one photo showing two T-Rexes celebrating with the bride and groom.
“We’re just nerdy people who enjoy the weird things in life,” Meador said.
Her original post was shared more than 38,000 times and garnered more than 19,000 comments in multiple languages, with many cheering the unconventional outfit and tagging friends.
"Tagging you in this because it’s funny but don’t get any ideas," one poster wrote to someone.
"I feel like you really missed an opportunity at our wedding …" another poster tagged a friend.
Meador has mixed feelings about the global attention, however. "This is actually a private joke that went waaaayyy too public," she said.
"I know I say I had no regrets ... but honestly this has gotten bigger than we wanted," she added, concerned about strangers bashing the wedding and hurting her sister. "Nobody could have outshined my sister on her wedding, not even a giant inflatable dinosaur … it was never my intention to steal her spotlight."
