Manolo for the Brides

Recently, one of my favorite online comics has included wedding planning in one of its many story arcs, and I thought I’d share some of the nuptial nuttiness with you. Here is some schooling on how to have a wedding, the Achewood way:

“any cake is a wedding cake if you call it that”

“Oh how genius to have the invitation and the program all in one man I TOTALLY saved cash. I am the graphic designer of the AGE.”

“Men in neckties do not wish to be hugged. Men in turtlenecks expect hugs at each encounter, no matter how trivial. Men in fezzes are unpredictable, and may be at your wedding for reasons that are unclear to you.”

I love my wedding guestbook, even if our hundred guests only used about six pages of it. As it turns out, a lot of people have small handwriting even when they’re penning loving messages on huge pages. Plus, a good portion of our guests also attended the rehearsal dinner, where they were asked to sign a poster. Maybe they were all sick of writing “best wishes” and similar messages?

The fact that so many pages remained blank even after I tried filling up the unused space with cards and other stuff tells me that the guestbook idea is one that is open to extreme levels of interpretation. Before you do anything else, try to envision a guestbook without the ‘book.’ I’ve read about guests filling out postcards that are sent to the newlyweds, writing on engraveable plates and platters that can be displayed or used, and even doling out salutations on river rocks!

Mélangerie created this unique guestbook for an outdoor wedding. Attendees were encouraged to “air out” the bride and groom’s dirty laundry. The instructions were printed on a modified detergent bottle and the cards were shaped like shirts, socks, and trousers, which were then clipped to a laudry line strung up in an entranceway.

Then again, it’s hard to lose the ‘book’ completely. Things like postcards usually end up being pasted into books.

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Few and far between are the lucky individuals who haven’t found themselves simultaneously single and invited to a wedding. If you’re invited as a onesome, the pressure’s off, and you can start worrying about what to wear and how you won’t know anyone at the reception and whether the buffet will include anything you, a vegan with a gluten allergy, can safely eat. It’s when your invitation comes addressed to “you plus one” that the fun begins.

Anon wrote in to ask about this very topic.

I (a straight female) received an invitation this week from a college friend, inviting me-plus-guest to her wedding. My immediate reaction, since I’m not dating anyone and don’t really want to scrape someone up to go to a wedding in another state, was to RSVP for myself alone. Then I remembered that my sister also knew the bride in college, as well as a lot of the other guests I’d assume are being invited. Would it be a no-no to bring my sister as my guest? Will it throw off the girl-boy ratio and ruin the wedding if I bring an extra female, rather than the expected extra male or coming alone? Is it weird to invite someone that the bride was friends with, but who she didn’t invite to the wedding herself? If I don’t have a date-date, should I just save the bride and groom the cost of another plate and go by myself? Am I just overthinking this and making a bigger deal of it than I should?

In the realm of traditional etiquette, it’s a well-established fact that one should never address an invitation to “and guest” or “plus one.” The bride and groom should invite those people they are close to, paying attention to social units and finding out the names of everyone’s significant others. It’s not gauche to invite solo guests — far from it, in fact! A friendly, outgoing single can have a marvelous time at a wedding.

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While researching nuptial facts for a possible second book, I came across one sorry tired old piece of washroom wisdom. The myth in question? That sweet little birdies will gorge themselves on tossed rice, which then expands in their tummies, killing them in a variety of ghastly ways.

Could someone tell that to all of the birds that live near rice paddies and rice processing plants because they don’t seem to have gotten the message. From Truth or Fiction: “The folks at Birder’s magazine, Birdwatcher Digest, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the USA Rice Federation all agree: Rice causes no harm to birds. There are varieties of birds that routinely eat rice in the wild and with no harm. As one observer put it, if rice caused birds to explode, there would be bird parts all over Asia.”

That doesn’t mean rice rules. It’s outlawed in many venues because it makes for slippery sidewalks and is a real pain to clean up. Plus, it gets EVERYWHERE (as does birdseed, by the way). For those who think a wedding is no wedding at all unless people are allowed to chuck stuff at the newlyweds, there’s always biodegradable confetti, rose petals, designer wedding “rice”, lavender, and non-staining bubbles

Better yet, don’t toss anything at all. Wave a handkerchief at the departing couple or blow them a kiss. A brief search reveals blogs and forum posts by former brides who had a dickens of a time picking the rice out of their updos and the lavender bits out of their bodices.

And some of those bell-shaped bubble blowers? I don’t want to alarm you, but be careful where you source them. Most wedding bubbles are made of so-called dry soap that won’t leave any wetness behind, but that’s most, not all. Before you invite your guests to pelt you and your sweetie with a barrage of bubbles, test your batch by blowing a few onto a tissue or piece of scrap cloth.

…as an aside, if you’re feeling charitable, I received an e-mail from a certain Amena and Chris, who are endeavoring to win a wedding giveaway by attracting enough votes. Should you feel so inclined, follow the link and give them your vote. Normally I wouldn’t link to something like this — I don’t know them from Adam, after all — but I rather admired the spunk they displayed by e-mailing to ask for help from the blogging world.

In meandering the internet looking for items of interest to our fine readers here at Manolo for the Brides, I came across a rather wonderful site with all sorts of lovely books online. It just so happens that one of the books archived there is the 1922 edition of Emily Post, and the section on weddings contains a great many gems of wisdom, as well as proof of two widely diverging theories: there’s nothing new under the sun, and the past is a foreign country.

As illustration of the second of these fine theories, I offer up this passage on compiling a guest list for a wedding:

In the cities where a Social Register or other Visiting Book is published, people of social prominence find it easiest to read it through, marking “XX” in front of the names to be asked to the house, and another mark, such as a dash, in front of those to be asked to the church only, or to have announcements sent them. Other names which do not appear in the printed list may be written as “thought of” at the top or bottom of pages. In country places and smaller cities, or where a published list is not available, or of sufficient use, the best assistant is the telephone book.

Who can fail to be simultaneously amused, charmed, and deeply alarmed by the concept of starting with the city phone book when compiling a guest list for a wedding? Clearly this is a very different world from the one we live in today.

The recent discourse on appropriate dress over at the Shoe Blog put me in a mind to contemplate hats. At my own wedding, I asked my mother and her ladywife to pick out some stylish headwear for the ceremony. I suppose they are lucky that I had not yet discovered the French wedding hat tradition, for I no doubt would have requested that they spend obscene amounts of money outfitting their heads.

According to photographer Bertrand Celce, who snapped the photo below, the wedding hat must be “original, classy, and elegant.”

Whoever invented this tradition was inspired, and a wedding without hats would not be a real wedding…or at least wouldn’t deserve that we try our best for the best of all days. Don’t forget that the groom and the bride often met at a previous wedding a few months before. And this particular hat on that particular face wasn’t neutral on that special day. Is there a better reason to care for the hats?

To see more of these uber fantastic hats, many of which are architectural wonders that stimulate the mind as well as the eye, have a peek at this blog entry by Tom Sanford. I think that I shall have to find myself a gorgeous and eye-catching hat to wear at the next wedding I attend so I can begin spreading the wedding hat tradition among my friends and peers.

In the Wedding Crashers, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are motivated by the promise of a little action (not to mention free food and booze). It seems real life wedding crashers are motivated by money. While stomping along on the treadmill at the gym this morning, I happened to catch a news segment about Anthony and Jennifer Smith, newlyweds who, after saying their vows, discovered that many of the envelopes on their gift table had mysteriously disappeared.

The dastardly man in the surveillance shot above pretended to leave a little something for the couple in question before scooping numerous envelopes into his jacket and departing hastily from the premises.

“You never think it’s going to happen, you know, to you,” Anthony Smith said Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “You’re celebrating, having a good time, and then you go on your honeymoon and you find out some guy just decides he needs to take everything.”

As it turns out, this isn’t the first time that brides and grooms at the Garden Grove, California chapel where the Smiths wed have been robbed. I think The Beard put it best when he said, “You have to be pretty darn low to do something like that.”

Many people, when thinking about weddings in general, envision poufy white gowns, pew bows, and lavish displays of frippery. But we should never forget that one couple’s wedding standards might just be another couple’s nuptial no-nos. Bleached lace and tulle aside, weddings do tend to inspire people to do themselves up a little. If you called Nigeria home, your wedding guests might look a little bit like these ladies.

Gotta love those hats! In the traditional Igbo wedding in eastern Nigeria, guests begin to arrive for the ceremonies at 2pm.
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At least four of my recently married friends left cutesy gift bags at the front desk for out-of-towners like me and The Beard. These were homemade, and included all sorts of little snacks and thingamajigs to occupy us during the off hours of the trip. We considered doing something similar, as almost all of the people attending our nuptials came from distant locales, but in the end, we were just too dang lazy. Too bad I hadn’t heard about the Kate Parker Wedding gift baskets for guests — then I would have had a reason to spend even more dough!

Baskets are customized by state, and while the web site only lists a handful of choices, they can furnish you with gift baskets reflecting the unique character of any state in the union. I would have chosen the “Miami’ basket, even though the wedding was held on Merritt Island. It includes Orange Gumballs from Florida By Mail in New Smyrna Beach (my paternal hometown), a custom map including 4-5 points of interest for the wedding weekend, and cookies from The Pastry Studio in Daytona Beach, among other stuff. Had I married in Boston, guests might have gotten coffee from Indigo Coffee in Northampton and maps of the city for both walkers and drivers.

The baskets are pricey at around $35 each, but if you have the money to spend, Kate Parker Weddings could save you the trouble of having to whip up a bunch of gift bags just days before your nuptials.