Skip to main content

Mild Wedding: Cultures

So, I lied just a tad. The Mild Wedding actually consisted of a couple of different events, rather than a single day's worth of festivities. One of those events was a Chinese wedding banquet, where they serve you ten courses of food. Yes, ten courses. Pretty much everyone left stuffed.

Now, the Chinese ceremony was obviously a nod to part of my heritage. I've been to enough Chinese weddings and have enough Chinese family nearby that we figured it made sense to get married that way, as well. In fact, I remember telling people that I didn't really consider myself completely, thoroughly married until the paper work was done AND we'd done the cultural ceremonies. We don't do things half-assed around here.

That said, I am a make up of several cultures (as has been documented in the past to amusing results), and the Mild Wife brings her own, unique cultural heritage to the table. So, we decided that we would make sure no particular cultural would get left out. Sure, it was a Chinese wedding banquet, but we were going to put our own spin on it. Tradition is nice and all, but it doesn't quite encompass the mix of history and culture that makes up yours truly or the Mild Wife.

Now, one of the things that traditionally happens at a Chinese wedding banquet is a bridal costume change. Generally speaking, it's considered good luck for the bride to wear several different dresses. So, it's pretty common for the bride to sneak away at some point to a back room to change into different attire. Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. I also had a costume change, into a Filipino barong. They're worn for important occasions, like, say, Mild Weddings. So, I put one on and did a costume change at the same time that the Mild Wife changed into a different dress (side note: one of the dresses was one that's been passed from cousin to cousin, so there was a nice touch of history there).

You should've seen the smiles and surprise on some of our guests' faces when they saw me rocking the barong. The Filipino ones were quite thoroughly amused, and the other folks were an equal part surprised and intrigued. As a non-trivial bonus, those things are light and airy. It's like air conditioning is built right into the clothing. It's pretty awesome.

The last, and arguably best, part of the cultural nods, though, was the favor we used. Up to that point, we'd covered all but my Latino side. So, as a wedding favor, we gave people individually wrapped alfajores (with a double happiness sticker on top). I don't remember exactly how many people went hunting for more alfajores on the tables, but it was more than a handful. My sister threatened to hurt her brother in law if he took hers. The Mild Wife was getting all sorts of text to the effect of, "oh my God! I just ate the cookie. Those things are awesome!" Basically, it went over well. I was laughing my head off when the Mild Wife told me about her friends and family's reactions to alfajores.

So, all in all, the fact that the Mild Wife and I bring several different cultures to the table made the Mild Wedding that much more amusing. Aren't different cultures fun?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Scratch 2

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inside and Outside

As I've mentioned before, the Mild Wife and I invested in a sewing machine during the pandemic. It was the most basic model we could find, but it was good enough for what we needed: to make a few masks. And now, over a year later, I still think that it was a good investment. Interestingly, even with restrictions being lifted a bit, we still find that we need masks. Some stores still require them, and neither of us wants to be in a position where we needed a mask and didn't have one. So, we still have to wear and wash them. And even though we've never run out of clean masks to wear, we did notice that we were close a couple of times. So, I recently broke out the sewing machine to make a few more masks. When we initially invested in supplies, we bought a pack of fabric squares. We figured we weren't going to need super high quality, and having a bunch of squares would give us options in case one of us screwed up (read: me). That also gave us the ability to add a little v...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...
Post a Comment
Read more