Little Brown Church.
Many couples have decided to get married on 11.11.11 and a dozen weddings are scheduled today at a northeast Iowa venue made famous by a hymn.
LuAnn Laughridge, the secretary at The Little Brown Church in Nashua, says they were prepared for the rush.
“Last year, when we had 10.10.10, we quite a few on that day, too, and also on 9.9.9,” Laughridge says, laughing. “We figured it was coming.”
A dozen weddings is not a single-day record at The Little Brown Church. Many couples seek out the venue for a Valentine’s Day wedding, and Laughridge says 14 weddings have been conducted on the 14th of February in some past years.
The “Church of the Land” in Urbandale was built on the site where Pope John Paul the second conducted an outdoor mass in 1979. Debbie Canfield is the person who schedules weddings at the church, where there’s a wedding scheduled this afternoon and another this evening.
“If I had more time in the day, I probably could have gotten three more weddings in there,” Canfield says.
There’s one other event at the historic church today, so this afternoon and evening are tightly scheduled. A couple who are getting married tomorrow on the 12th of November are having their rehearsal there between the two weddings.
“I have had quite a few calls in the last three months, hoping that we still had space in there,” Canfield says. “Nobody wanted to do it in the morning. They all wanted evening weddings.”
Reverend Kathy Love conducted a ceremony this morning, at 11 minutes after 11 o’clock for one couple who staged their wedding at the Des Moines Botanical Center.
“I’m not really an expert on numerology but I heard on the news this morning that in numerology, 11.11.11 — all those numbers add up to six and in numerology that’s symbolic of heart,” Love says. “I just kind of get goosebumps about that and so what better day to get married.”
Love and her husband, James, run a business called “The Wedding Chapel” in Clive. They have planned four weddings for today.
“Number one, it’s going to be easy to remember your anniversary,” Love says. “So for all the guys, that’s a blessing.”
The numeric sequence of 11.11.11 is a palindrome — a sequence of numbers which can be read the same way in either direction.