Along with the excitement of a wedding comes all the events and parties that lead up to the big day. One of the most popular pre-wedding celebrations is the bridal shower. Or is it the kitchen tea? They are similar, but there are a few differences.
Kitchen teas are more common in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, whereas the US, UK, Belgium, Netherlands and a few other countries in Europe tend to host bridal showers.
The kitchen tea is a time to celebrate the bride-to-be, and guests bring items that can be added to the newlyweds’ kitchen as gifts. It is typically hosted at the bride’s or her mother’s house. Female friends and family are invited – kitchen teas are typically attended only by the women in the bride’s life. It is usually quite a relaxed environment and can involve fun games.
The bridal shower is a party hosted for the bachelorette. Her guests ‘shower’ her with gifts of any kind, that can be for her personal use or for her and her future spouse’s home. Brides-to-be may create a gift registry for their guests to help with ideas. The bridal shower provides the perfect opportunity for both sides of the family to mingle!
There’s no need to keep things too traditional, though. You can mix it up a bit by having a theme. You can even customise the party according to what the bachelorette likes. For example, a bride-to-be who enjoys the outdoors might appreciate a hike or scenic route, or a bachelorette with a creative streak may love a cake-decorating party.
Remember to save all the ‘naughty’ things for the bachelorette party, though!
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Whether you are paying for the wedding yourselves or your parents are contributing, you will need to calculate how much money you have to spend. Once you have this figure, immediately set aside 5-10% of that for contingency.
Establishing and sticking to your budget is the best gift you can give yourself as a couple. In order to do this, you have to ensure that all your planning is documented. But before you start crunching numbers, think about the overall feeling you want your wedding to have as this will affect how you spend within your budget.
Do your research on vendors and get estimates on how much each thing will cost. This will include everything from venue to flowers to the dress and so on. Then get quotes from vendors and write it all down next to estimated costs.
Now that you know what kind of wedding you would like to have and how much money you have to spend, put together a rough guest list. The number of guests determines your venue, food and alcohol.
These are generally the largest expenses and a wise rule to follow is to allocate 40% of your budget to these three things.
It is time to discuss your non-negotiables with your partner (try to keep it down to three). These are things that you have always dreamed of having at your wedding and are willing to spend the money needed in order to achieve them. Research vendors and get quotes so that you can allocate it to the budget and then see how much is left to spend on the rest of the wedding. If you are already over budget based on your list, or close to the end of your budget, have a look at your priorities again and see what you can reduce.
Now that you’ve got all your quotes and guest list numbers, you can create the spreadsheet. You can get a template online or create your own but try to keep it as simple as possible. Put your overall sum in the top corner somewhere and then create these tabs: estimated, modified and actual.
Your estimated tab will be amounts that you have found based on research.
Modified will have real quotes from vendors.
Actual will be the final amount that you end up paying.
Time for a reality check – does your budget allow you to achieve what you want? If not, you may have to adjust your budget if that is an option or adjust your expectations.
Steps to take in order to ensure you stick to your budget:
- Figure out how much you have to spend.
- Research vendors and get quotes before settling on your budget.
- Write a list including all researched costs and quotes from vendors.
- Write down your proposed guest list
- Create the spreadsheet and input all the relevant information.
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Let’s be honest, we all know a few. Wedding superstitions have been around for centuries. The question is, do you believe in them? Not seeing your loved one the night before the big day, lest the groom changes his mind at the last minute, is a widely-known superstition.
Here are a few superstitions you may not have come across:
1. Ditch the yellow roses. It is said that yellow roses symbolise jealousy.
2. The incy wincy spider superstition – finding a spider on your wedding dress is supposedly a sign of good luck.
3. Welcome the tears. Some people people it is good to cry on your wedding day, as it means you will have no more tears left to cry in your marriage.
4. Dodge the nun or monk. It is said that a bride who sees a nun or monk on her wedding day will be cursed with infertility and poverty.
5. In the wedding world, Saturday is viewed as the least lucky day of the week to get married, while Wednesday is supposedly the best day to wed. Getting married on the 13th of the month also does not bode well, and getting hitched in the month of May is seen as unlucky too, due to the Romans’ festival of the dead that was always held in May.
6. The bride and evil spirits. One belief held by some is that the bride is more susceptible to evil spirits. In some cultures, the bride therefore needs to be carried over the threshold in order to be protected from them. She also has to wear a veil to ward off the spirits. Roman brides, meanwhile had to wear garlands and wreaths because they believed that if you were inside a circle, malicious spirits could not harm you, while in Ireland, it was believed that ringing bells would shoo the supernatural away.
7. If you have an older, unmarried sister, one superstition has it that she needs to dance barefoot at your wedding. If not, she will be at risk of never getting married.
8. Count the pieces. In Italy, it is thought that you have to break glass on your big day and count all the pieces – the number tells you how many years you’ll be married.
9. Don’t be a butterfingers! Some believe that if someone drops the wedding ring during the ceremony, they will be the first of everyone at the ceremony to die.
10. Let the heavens open – it is said by some that rain on your wedding day brings fertility and cleansing.
So, which of these do you believe in?
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Before the “I do’s” come the infamous bachelor parties. Fuelled by movies like The Hangover, there are certainly some crazy and shocking stories out there. Here are a few stories from anonymous brides- and grooms-to-be of stag do’s that didn’t go quite as planned.
In one groom’s story, the stag do started out fairly tame, with everything fairly in order. As the party proceeded however, along came the stripper. Organised by his group of friends, the groom-to-be was unaware of who the woman was. It was only upon her arrival that he saw the stripper was his ex-girlfriend’s mother – certainly not a pleasant surprise.
In a separate story, the bachelor spent the night before the big day drinking copious amounts of alcohol. The menu included a fifth of rum, 30 beers, a bottle of whiskey, and more – followed by a head injury and a blackout. The husband-to-be only woke up just four hours before the wedding and managed to make it there just in time, an hour before the ceremony started.
Another man had been dating his fiancée for a few years. She had recently made friends with a man at work. The groom-to-be had mixed feelings about the colleague but somehow this man ended up being a groomsman. At the stag do, after a lot of alcohol, the bachelor broke down in tears and left his own party. The partygoers later found out that the suspicious co-worker was having an affair with the bride-to-be.
Hoping to be a little smarter than others, one bachelor decided to have his party a week before the wedding. He also not-so-smartly indulged in a little too much alcohol (we’re starting to see a pattern here) and fell off a deck, three floors above the ground. He attended his wedding with two broken wrists and a shaved head due to the stitches he needed above one of his ears.
A different groom-to-be decided to party it up in Vegas. He met a girl there and the two exchanged numbers, to his fiancée’s knowledge. The bride-to-be was at home with a tablet that must was linked to the bachelor’s phone, and received all the texts between the two. The wedding was called off.
So whether it’s confirming that you DON’T know the stripper, knowing your alcohol limits, trusting your gut or steering clear of high-rise venues, here are some of the crazy stag do situations you definitely want to steer clear of experiencing yourself.
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