Tea Set For Our Chinese Wedding Tea Ceremony
In 2010 when my parents went back to Hong Kong I had asked them to pick up a tea set for us to use during our wedding tea ceremony. There were so many tea set to choose from when I visited earlier in the year but I didn’t pick one because I wasn’t sure what my parents and grandparents would prefer. After all, the tea ceremony is really about them so I wanted to make sure the tea set is one that they’ll like. I personally would like something that’s a bit more modern, but not cute (like ones with cartoon characters). My grandmother dislike having the handle on the tea cups (for reasons which she did not disclose) so I had reminded my parents to choose a set that have no cup handles.
When my parents came back with the tea set I was slightly disappointed because it was a very traditional Chinese design. I don’t mind the colours because you really can’t avoid red in a Chinese wedding but I was hoping the design would be more modern and simple. On the wedding day however, I actually thought the design worked very well for us. Since our wedding theme is “Chinese”, the tradition look matched well with my qi pao and also with my parent’s century old home.
Now that the wedding is over I’m not quite sure what to do with the tea set. It’s definitely not something I’d use to serve tea to my guests at home.
My Wedding Bouquet
It’s almost a week since our wedding and I’m still trying to catch up on sleep. The wedding itself went pretty smoothly despite a few kinks and surprises. I thought we’ve both handled it pretty well. I’m planning to write a post about the wedding day later when I have more time. For now I wanted to share with you my bouquet which I loved! I’m not a big flower person so my only requirements for my florist, Kathleen from Proline Trading, is that I want textures (lots of it). So we decided to go with an all orchids bouquet. The bridesmaid had baby pink roses and pink gerberas and we used fuschia gerberas for the toss bouquet as well as our wedding cake decorations (more photos to come later).
The groom used orchid for his boutonniere while the groomsmen wore pink roses to match the bridesmaids. All special guests had yellow pom pom flowers as boutonniere. Yellow was not our wedding colour but we really liked the shape of the flower and they are very different (thus made the wearer stands out even more). Also the yellow popped up nicely on everyone’s different coloured clothing. Here’s a picture I took two days after the wedding:
Another awesome thing about these yellow pom pom flowers is that they are very durable! Al’s boutonniere were a bit broken by dinner time because he was driving and the seat belt kept crushing the orchid. We didn’t thought about this while we were ordering our flowers or I would’ve asked for a yellow pom pom for his boutonniere too.
Florist Info:
Proline Trading International
Contact: Kathleen Chiu
Website: http://www.prolinetrading.com/
One Week Till Wedding Day!
My apologies for the lack of updates on this blog. I’ve been quite busy the past months ironing out wedding details. As the wedding date get closer, everyone seems to want to add their two cents into how everything should be done. It was mind boggling and I’m glad it’s almost over! Any how, the past week, while watching the Canucks games, I spent time doing all the wedding flavors. Here’s how they look like:
[My little army of red boxes. All lined up on my rug for counting!]
We got these boxes from Wedding Things a few years back. We really like the design of the box. It has lots of Chinese last name embossed on it. The double happiness tag is a perfect fit for our wedding theme. We’ve filled it with chocolates, hopefully the guests will like it as much as we do.
[Here's a close up of the box.]
I’ve also finished our wedding program for the ceremony. Originally my idea for the program will look similar to the invitation card. However, I wanted to save time and money, as well as use up all our existing materials. So here’s what our final program looks like:
[The names have been removed for privacy.]
The design uses half a letter sized paper (the same one as our invitation insert) and folded in a Z-fold. Our printer can’t do double sided print automatically. So to save time we only print on one side, with three panels, for the Z-fold. The front panel is our name, date, location as well as the wedding party names. The inside middle panel is the order of the ceremony, and the final panel is the photo order. To tie the program to the invitation design, I used a strip of the bubble design paper to wrap around the program.
Hopefully the guests will like the program and the wedding favors we’ve prepared. I can’t believe we’re only a week away from the wedding day!
Our Handmade Wedding Invitation
[Click to enlarge]
After the betrothal exchange we were finally able to hand out our invitations. I’ve been making them in batches and recently completed 125 invitations. There are still a few more I need to make but they are not urgent so I’m going to take a break and work on the next item which is the wedding day rundown.
The one thing that I really like about our invitation is that it looks like a little present. I’ve spent hours cutting out every piece of paper that goes on to this invitation so I hope every one will like them as much as me.
The Betrothal (過大禮) – Chinese Wedding Custom
Last weekend we finally had the betrothal, but unfortunately both of us weren’t there! Apparently the groom isn’t supposed to be there so Al can’t go and I had to oversee the delivery of our furniture that morning so I wasn’t able to be there as well. However I did ask my dad to take some pictures for me so I can show you (and myself!) what the gifts are.
That morning Al’s older brother and cousin bought the betrothal gifts over to my parents house. I’m not sure what happened but it’s most likely that they had tea and probably some awkward moments before they opened the gifts and then divided them up so the groom’s side can take some back as “return gift”.
Al’s mom got the Chinese wedding pastries from Maxim. The bakery also offers rental of special wedding boxes for you to present the pastries or any items you are bringing to the bride’s family. Here’s a picture of what the boxes look like.
I’m not sure what size the round boxes are but they were able to fit a lot of small packages inside. Here’s what they look like after we opened the lid:
In the rectangular box they had put the cake cards ($10 bakery gift cards for the guests on the bride’s side) and red pocket (禮金). In the round boxes they had managed to squeeze in all the little bags of dried food and the Chinese pastries. Lets see what’s inside:
My parents have put all the Chinese pastries into those cake boxes from Maxim (in the back). There are 2 red pockets (the two big ones in the centre of the photo) for items that we have missed in the betrothal, such as the live chickens, coconut…etc. There’s a bunch of dried food there. I can only recognized the dried scallops, dried oysters and dried dates. There are two cans of abalone, Chinese tea, wine, sesame, peanuts, walnuts and fresh fruits. The box in the middle-left of the image, next to the can of abalone, is the pair of Dragon and Phoenix Cake. Each family will have one pair of these cakes.
Now that the betrothal is over, we can finally give out our invitations. According to tradition, the betrothal take place about 15-20 days before the wedding date. However we did ours a lot earlier because I wanted to give out our invitations and have guests RSVP sooner. I don’t quite understand how you can expect to organize your RSVP if you give your invites out so close to the wedding date. Dad said that’s the way things were when he got married and back then, basically everyone you invite will show up so it’s not a problem giving out the invitation so late.
Al and I are so glad that the betrothal is over. There were a lot of kinks along the way, such as trying to figure out how many Chinese wedding pastries to order or what items to include in the betrothal. Now that this is over, it’s time to move on to the next challenging task: figuring out the seating plan.
