The mountain's daughter was Sati come back, and she knew whom she wanted before she could name him. When the god of love failed and was burnt for trying, she chose the harder road. She put off her ornaments, went into the high forests and sat through summers between fires and winters in the snow, and at last gave up even fallen leaves, which is why the poets call her Aparna. An old brahmin found her there and set about talking her out of it: the man she wanted lived in burning grounds, wore snakes, had no family and no home. She told the stranger to be quiet, that she would hear no word against Shiva, and turned to leave. The brahmin dropped his disguise. Shiva had come himself to test her and was won. The marriage was held in her father's house in the mountains, with Brahma to recite the rites, and from it came the two sons, the war-god and the elephant-headed one. Kalidasa made the story a court epic and the Shiva Purana's Parvati Khanda tells it at length.
North India · Rajasthan, UP, Bihar, NepalFolk🪔 Teej
The women who keep Teej tell that Parvati fasted and suffered through a hundred and seven lives and was accepted by Shiva only in the hundred and eighth. In the Hartalika telling her father had arranged to marry her to Vishnu; her friends carried her off into the forest so that the match could not be made, and there her penance brought Shiva. The festival's fasts are kept in her memory for a husband's long life.
What is different here:
Adds the 108 births and the abduction by friends to escape a marriage to Vishnu; a women's festival charter rather than an epic.
South India · Madurai, Tamil NaduShaiva🪔 Meenakshi Tirukalyanam
In Madurai the bride is Meenakshi, the Pandya queen, and the groom is Sundareswarar; her brother Vishnu gives her away, and the temple carves the scene with Vishnu on the left handing her to Shiva. Every Chithirai month the wedding is played again with the temple-car festival following it.
What is different here:
A royal wedding with Vishnu as the bride's brother; celebrated in April–May, not on Shivaratri; see the Meenakshi story for the bride's own birth.
Elephanta's sixth-century sculptors carved the wedding with the mountain-king standing behind his daughter and Brahma seated as priest, a stone witness to the Puranic version.
What is different here:
Iconographic record, not a telling; confirms Brahma as officiant.
Sources: Parvati — Wikipedia; The Siva Purana (4 vols), tr. J. L. Shastri — via Wisdom Library; Teej — Wikipedia; Shraavana — Wikipedia; Maha Shivaratri — Wikipedia; Meenakshi Temple — Wikipedia; Elephanta Caves — Wikipedia