Meghan McCain Says She Got 'Drunk on Whiskey' at Her Wedding — and Dad John McCain Cried

Meghan McCain is back at work.

On Monday, the daughter of Sen. John McCain resumed her co-hosting duties on ABC’s The View, less than a week after she tied the knot with conservative pundit Ben Domenech.

“We got married at our ranch in Sedona and it was real country,” she said on the show. “I wanted a western country wedding — my aisle was cowhide. I want to give a big special shout-out to Shooter Jennings for singing. … And I pulled Clay Aiken out of retirement to sing and got my dad to cry.”

“I got very drunk on whiskey,” she added with a laugh. “And had a great time dancing the entire time.”

Overall, McCain said the entire celebration was “really fun” — even though she’s usually not a big fan of ornate weddings.

“I think we sort of overdo it with weddings in general … but I understand why people do this,” she said. “It’s a beautiful celebration of love.”

The new bride — who got engaged at the Mayo Clinic in July, shortly after her father was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive stage 4 brain cancer — said that it was almost “more meaningful” to be “celebrating love in a time of sadness.”

As her co-hosts began joking about losing your virginity on your wedding night, McCain quipped: “I’m a big proponent of testing the car before you drive it, for a lot of reasons.”

Asked whether it felt different to return home as a married couple, McCain said “not at all.”

“We came back to New York and had tomato soup and watched Home Alone 2 last night,” she said.

McCain, 33, wed Domenech just before sunset at the family lodge in Sedona, Arizona on Nov. 21. In PEOPLE’s exclusive first photo from the nuptials, the bride was beaming with joy as she and her groom posed alongside her mother Cindy and her father, who wore a boot for a torn Achilles tendon.

The pre-Thanksgiving celebration — for approximately 100 guests including close friends, family and former colleagues who worked on Sen. McCain’s two presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2008 — came just four months after he revealed that he was battling brain cancer.

A rep for the bride told PEOPLE in an exclusive statement that Sen. McCain, 81, gave his daughter away before she was married by John Dickerson. Following the ceremony, the couple celebrated with dinner and dancing surrounded by their family and close friends.

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Wedding planner Jim Bullock from Events by Showstoppers exclusively told PEOPLE that the theme of the wedding was Western hunting lodge — “very 1920s-looking” — featuring a cigar bar and gambling casino with roulette tables, poker tables and slot machines.

The menu was all wild game — “something you would have if you were in a tented hunting lodge,” Bullock explained — and for the ceremony, they had an arbor made of birch limbs and bleached elk horns at the end of the aisle, positioned near a beautiful creek.

“Meghan is very cool and she just kind of didn’t say no to anything,” Bullock said. “She really went 100 percent with everything.”