BOSTON (WHDH) - A group of more than 100 people who recently gathered for an annual holiday pub crawl at Boston’s Faneuil Hall looked on in awe when the celebration morphed into an impromptu wedding ceremony.
Mark Brierley and Katie Grillo invited dozens of unsuspecting family members and friends to the special event, which ended in holy holiday matrimony.
“I’m still in shock. I mean we pulled off a surprise pub crawl wedding in the middle of December, in Boston, with 150 people,” Mark Brierley told 7NEWS.
The couple has been hosting a much-beloved pub crawl through Boston for years. When they got engaged, they thought a surprise wedding during the crawl was a perfect idea.
“We just got so excited that we kept getting these silly ideas,” Grillo said. “We were like, ‘do you think we could pull this off? I don’t know, let’s try it!'”
The couple made a few strategic phone calls to close family and friends but otherwise kept their sweet surprise under wraps until the crawl was underway.
“We had our friend Dave stand up at Ginger Man and tell everybody that it was going to happen and invite everybody to the wedding,” Brierley said.
Brierley wore his normal outfit for the day — cousin Eddie from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” — but his bride had to race to get ready.
“I had 40 minutes to go from being an elf to being a bride, so I had a team of elves,” Grillo said. “There were 13 of them in total.”
The couple made their way to the Rose Kennedy Greenway, where their friends sang Christmas carols, and then someone dressed as Frosty the Snowman led the wedding ceremony.
“Our friends just know how much we love this event. They know how playful we are and how much fun we like to have, so they were just on board,” Grillo said.
The wedding for the season was sealed with a Christmas kiss.
“I think we’re both still kind of in shock with how perfect it all was,” Grillo said.
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