Please do me a favour

On Wednesdays I share everything wedding with you: tips, projects, organisation, photos, faux-pas, fun things and golden rules I ‘learned’ from my own wedding. I feel I need to give something back to the fabulous blog community who helped me stay sane and enjoy every second of my ‘big day’.

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When I started doing my research on weddings, I quickly came across a tradition that was completely foreign to me. Wedding Favours. Obviously in Australia, the UK and the US wedding guests expect that they get a little (or not so little) present for attending a wedding. Somehow this sounded a bit odd to me but somehow it was appealing as well.

I love to give presents – big and small, for special occasions or ‘simply because’. But wedding favours confronted me with a few challenges:
a) I don’t like standard presents – and finding special presents for each of my 80 wedding guests would have taken me at least a year and I would have needed to quit my full-time job
b) I didn’t have a big budget for my wedding – and even if you look for affordable favours, it adds up if you multiply it by 80
c) we just spend two weeks in Germany around our wedding – so we had to take all presents with us from Australia, within our 20kg luggage allowance

In the end we decided against favours for every wedding guest and opted instead for

• a better drinks & food package for everyone. I personally prefer a better wine, which doesn’t cause you a headache the next day, and an extra course at dinner over a personalised wedding napkin ring.

• an Australian plush animal for all children. Because nothing lights up the faces of little ones more and beats boring parts of a wedding better than a new furry friend.

• cuff links with the initials for our nearest and dearest male guests (fathers, brothers, best man, etc.) from qacreate found at Etsy. Because we wanted to show them how much we appreciated their help prior and at the wedding.

• beautiful little handbags for our lovely ladies (mums, sisters, maid of honour,...) from Olga Berg. Because without them organising a wedding from overseas would have been a nightmare or even impossible. 
• prints of the best photos of everyone. We sent those together with the thank you cards as a reminder how much fun we had together on the day.

Since most of my guests were not familiar with the tradition of wedding favours and because the wedding turned into a lavish party, no one really missed traditional bitter-sweet almonds, engraved photo frames, or matching ties. At least I hope this is the case – I didn’t hear any complaints though ;-)