Maid of Honor Speech for a Cousin (Short, About 2.5 Minutes)

The speech

Hi, everyone. I'm Kerensa, Isolde's cousin, and I'm the maid of honor because our grandmother Paz told her to pick me, and nobody in this family has ever said no to Paz.

Every July when we were kids, all eight cousins got shipped to Grandma Paz's house on Lake Winona for two weeks, and every July, Isolde ran the Cousin Olympics. She was eleven the first year. She made a schedule. There was a cannonball contest, a rock-skipping final, a relay with the inflatable alligator, and medals made from bottle caps and yarn.

I came in last. Every event, every year, for six straight summers. I was the youngest and the slowest and I could not skip a rock to save my life.

And every year, at the closing ceremony on the dock, Isolde handed out one extra medal. Most Improved. It went to me, six years in a row, including the year I got worse. She would look me straight in the eye and say, "Kerensa, the committee was impressed," and the committee was her, and she was eleven, and then twelve, and then seventeen, and she never once broke.

That is Isolde. She makes the rules, she runs the show, and she makes sure the kid who lost goes home with something around her neck. She has been doing that for every one of us ever since.

Then came Nestor. The first time he came to the lake, he beat her at gin rummy four hands straight. We all held our breath. Isolde got up, walked into the kitchen, and came back with a bottle cap on a piece of yarn. She hung it around his neck. First place. I had never seen her give one of those away in twenty years.

Nestor, she gave you the gold. In this family, that is the whole thing.

Please raise your glasses. To Isolde and Nestor. The committee is very impressed.

Why it works: It trusts a single childhood memory, the bottle-cap medal, and reuses it for the groom and the toast, so a short speech still has a beginning, a turn, and an ending.