STORY:
Cold New Year Nuptials

Ice Church in Arctic choice for one couple's wedding ceremony.

(Everything2000) Santa's reindeer will be busy this New Year's Eve pulling in guests to a wedding ceremony in the Arctic. The reindeer will be joined by sled dogs, and snowmobiles as a group gathers for a millennium wedding ceremony at the Ice Church of Sweden.

Torbjoem Brostroem and Yana Mangi will need a wool gown and a wooly tuxedo to stay warm because the ice chapel is just that, a church made of ice. The church is located in the village of Jukkasjaervi, which is 100 miles above the border of the Arctic Circle. BRRRRRR.

The chapel is carved out of ice and will be covered with loose snow. It is part of an Ice hotel which is about 15, 000 square-feet and includes 43 rooms, the church and a bar. The one-story Ice Hotel, Ishotellet in Swedish, is built every December and lasts until sometime in May.

This is going to be a ceremony with ethic elements in a remote location, but it is anything but isolated. In fact, this wedding is going to be broadcast around the world thanks to the power of television. British Broadcasting Corporation and Swedish television will both film the event for use in worldwide coverage of the New Year festivities.

The bride and groom are both members of local band called Giron, which is the Sami name for Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden. The bride is of Sami descent and said the wedding will include several ethnic elements including a Lappish shaman who will perform a song he wrote for the occasion. The Sami, also known as Lapps, are indigenous people of extreme northern Sweden, Norway, Russia and Finland.

The wedding dress will also be made according to Sami tradition with green homespun frieze and trimmed with fur and leather and the groom will wear a homespun wool suit. They will need these kind of clothes because it is going to be downright chilly in the chapel.

This isn't the first wedding at the chapel by any means. The Ice Hotel is in its tenth year and in that time there have been more than 140 weddings and baptisms inside.

Luckily, there is an ice bar in the Ice Hotel that houses the Ice Chapel, and hopefully they will have a celebration toast without the champagne and instead toast with a steaming hot toddy!