A toast to one amazing couple and 10 goats

I‘m a sucker for a good wedding tale.

I can happily watch films like “Four Weddings and A Funeral” and “Father of the Bride” over and over again. Last summer I even loved “Wedding Crashers.” There’s just something about that archetypal ritual that mesmerizes me. Whether I’m weeping with laughter or reaching for a Kleenex, I’m seldom unmoved.

Now in this season of weddings, here comes yet another story, this one to remind me of one of my all-time favorite matrimonial movie lines: “in the name of the father, the son and the holy goat.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This wedding started out a bit differently than most. Stephen and Jaye Hopkins decided to skip one contemporary step of the ritual – the trip into a housewares store to pick up a price gun and take aim at the flatware and china of their dreams.

Instead, the bride and the groom devised an entirely different wedding registry. They figured out a way to take the spirit of giving that surrounded their joyful day and spread it clear across to the Indian Ocean. They asked their guests to donate to poor fishing families living in the district of Alappuzha, Kerala, in South India.

For $52, about the price of a Kate Spade crystal bud vase, wedding guests could buy enough grain to sustain a family during monsoon season. For $73, nearly the price of Pottery Barn’s champagne-colored engravable photo album, they could buy a family a goat.

At first, a few of the guests sounded confused. Stephen suspected they didn’t read the card printed in the invitation. “Don’t have a cow,” it said. “Give one.”

But a couple of weeks before the wedding, the donations started arriving. Stephen and Jaye were married on June 10 at the Spokane Club, and wedding gifts have been pouring into openhearts.org ever since.

So far, the guests have given just over $3,000 that will go toward building a house for the Pallikethayil family that Stephen Hopkins sponsors through Franciscan Family Apostolate – as well as about 10 goats, several scholarships, a cow, and bags of grain for other families in the region.

A charity registry, for this couple, felt exactly right.

Stephen, a graduate of Ferris High School and Seattle University, is 30 and starting a job as an intensive care nurse at Sacred Heart Medical Center. Jaye, 26, is completing her master’s degree in analytical chemistry at the University of Minnesota this summer and hopes to teach.

First Jaye and then Stephen began sponsoring families in India. Stephen sends off a $40 check each month. It’s not for religious reasons. He was raised Catholic, but doesn’t consider himself a practicing one now.

Jaye’s e-mail signoff includes a quote from Tolkien: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

Neither of them, back from a honeymoon in Germany where they watched World Cup soccer, sound remotely sad about missing out on wedding presents.

“We didn’t feel like we needed all this stuff,” Stephen says. “I’ve got a blender, I’ve got a toaster, and I’ve got silverware.”

A few of their friends thought they were crazy. Jaye found it tricky not to insult those who were simultaneously planning weddings with traditional registries.

And then there was a buddy of Stephen’s, a guy who recently returned from Africa. He looked at a photo of the Pallikethayil family’s hut in India and said, “Hey, man, some of the places I went in Africa make your family’s shack look like a mansion.”

Stephen didn’t say what he thought: “This isn’t a poverty contest. … There’s a million places in the world you could do this. India just happens to be one.”

Last week Stephen and Jaye shared with me the links to their online wedding photos as well as a collection of images of the families they’re helping in India. First I caught a glimpse of the Spokane wedding party, with their wide smiles, mouths gaping with laughter and eyes filling with tears.

And then I clicked through the photos from India of Matthew Joseph Pallikethayil and his wife Kochuthresia, their daughters Elite and Hazel and their little son Jithin. Jaye’s mother took these pictures when she visited India earlier this year. She captured the Indian couple in the very moment when they learned that the Hopkins’ wedding presents would help them build a real house.

Their expressions echoed those on the faces at the Spokane Club. In one picture Kochuthresia clasps her hand over her open mouth, ecstatic. In another Matthew beams like an elated groom.

I imagine all of these shots filling an album at Stephen and Jaye’s house one day, mementos of a wedding even more beautiful than most. I just hope somebody thinks to snap the photo of a goat.