Weddingbee Blog

Why? Well, for starters, all this wedding business has, as you can imagine, made me a bit sentimental.

I know china is highly impractical and probably won’t get much use but I want it kinda for the same reason I splurged on my Regina B jewelry. Not to make things too heavy for you Bee readers, but my parents left Cuba in 1969, pretty late already in the whole scheme of the Cuban revolution. My father, a lawyer and an accountant, had to “earn” his right to leave the country by working the fields in a “camp” cutting sugar cane. You had to cut a certain amount and meet a quota to earn the right to leave. You also had to wait for certain documents saying you could go. In the meantime, my mom waited with my two older siblings (who were quite young at the time) back at their home many miles away. The news that it was your turn to go could come at any time but if you hadn’t met your quota, your moment to leave would pass and you’d be stuck on the island (as a side note having nothing to do with weddings but as a testament to the kindness of humankind: in the camp where my dad worked men who barely knew each other, strangers, stayed up through many nights, all night to cut enough sugar cane to fulfill another man’s quota when his notice to leave would come, thereby guaranteeing that man and his family WOULD be able to leave).

Anyway, when the time to GO came, they would have to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice and when you live like that, there’s only so much you can pack and take with you. Besides, the government wouldn’t let them take with them anything of value (I’ve heard that some people did, yes, by smuggling, etc., but my parents would not have dared), so they didn’t even get to take their wedding rings people! Nothing. In short, neither my parents nor their children own anything that could have been passed down generation to generation because those things got left behind on that tiny island they called their home many years ago.

I know material things can’t make up for memories and other emotions, but I can’t help thinking that it would be nice, now that I am starting my own family, and have the financial and other types of freedoms to do so, plus the fact that we are having a wedding and most people will be generous enough to gift us, to have a few meaningful things of my own that could possibly become heirlooms. And that’s where the china comes in.

The next big question then is which set of china. You see, when we actually went in person into Macy’s to register, we couldn’t find a single set of china we liked. They all looked the same: white or ivory plates with gold or platinum rims. It was only by looking online that we came across this “Aureus” pattern. We had to actually order a sample salad plate online and have it shipped to us to see how it would look in our home and on our table. We loved it and as such, we added it to our list! It’s the Villeroy & Boch “Aureus” pattern:

Here’s how it looks in our home:

Now, whenever I get the chance, I stop at every possible Macy’s to see if they’ve started to physically carry this pattern in their stores, but no luck, at least not in these parts. What this means, me thinks, is that there is a high probability that not many people will purchase pieces of the set for us, with the exception of our younger friends who already love to shop online, thereby avoiding the hassle of having to shop in person.

We may be running a huge risk here though because, truth be told, we don’t have much else on our registries. We are also registered at Crate & Barrel and Williams-Sonoma, but we literally have six things listed at each of those places and we’re inviting between 140 to 150 guests at the moment.

With this pattern, I worry that we may end up having to fulfil much of the china set ourselves after the wedding.

I’m also concerned that this particular pattern locks us in to a certain style pretty much forever (china is a BIG investment). Since originally adding this set to our registry, I’ve become enamored with this other Villeroy & Boch set, the “Country Heritage.”

I also think that this style fits in much better with our overall style sensibility; in fact, I think it even goes with our dining room furniture better than the “Aureus” (but will we always have this same furniture?). Mr. Petunia does find it a bit bland though, being that it’s just basically, well: white. I happen to like that about it and imagine the possibilities of being able to incorporate other beautiful items from other sets into it down the line. On the other hand, I feel a bit guilty asking our guests to spend so much money on plain white plates.

Which do you prefer?