Weddingbee Blog

As I’ve mentioned before, our wedding ceremony is going to be a combination of Buddhist and Hindu traditions. A few months ago, Mr. Margarita and I reviewed the details of our ceremonies/traditions and came up with an integrated ceremony. Buddhist ceremonies are about 30 minutes long, while some Hindu ceremonies can last for over two hours. Mr. Margarita and I, however, would like to keep our combined ceremony to 1.5 hours. It’s still a pretty lengthy ceremony so I am going to break it up into three posts.

Baraat
An important and festive component of the Hindu ceremony is the baraat, or arrival of the groom. The groom generally rides in on a decorated horse or elephant and is accompanied by his family members, relatives and friends in big procession with dhol player(s), and dancing.

Mr. Margarita will actually be riding in on a elephant from Have Trunk Will Travel. Mr. Margarita’s younger cousin (if he will cooperate) will also be riding the elephant.

Image courtesy of Andrena Photography

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The modern Sri Lankan wedding often borrows heavily from British traditions. We wear white/ivory colored sari’s, veils, and carry bridal bouquets. The picture below is of my parents on their wedding day almost 39 years ago!

How hot is my Mom? She rocked the beehive hair-do under that long veil

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I’ve been thinking about wedding favors for some reason from the moment we got engaged. I think it’s because my sister in law gave me the idea to give away pashmina shawls. We were going to order a bunch of them and then tie them on the back of chairs to look like ribbon/chair decorations. Then at some point in the night, we’d tell our guests what they were and to take them home as gifts. I was even going to get little labels made with our names and wedding date sewn on them. I eventually abandoned this plan as the numbers grew to 450-500. Also, I was feeling bad for not even attempting to include the men in the favor.

So, one day my mom and I were talking and we came up with the idea of doing something with tea. Sri Lankans and Indians alike are obsessed with tea so this seemed like a pretty perfect idea. Then Mrs. Onion posted about using adagio tea samples for wedding favors. I went on their site and ordered some samples, and they were adorable. I came up with this idea to do a Ceylon tea (Sri Lankan tea) and a Darjeeling (Indian tea) so it brings the two cultures together. I think I’m going to stick little Sri Lankan and Indian flags on them or something like that to make the idea clear.
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I’ve also been MIA and I’m so sorry for the delay in posts. I’m in California right now with Mr. Margarita doing a crazy amount of wedding things in a short amount of time. I really can’t believe we are two months away!

So, I introduced my color scheme and invitation mood board in my last post. With my color scheme in mind, the first thing Saima designed was our save the dates. I didn’t give Saima much direction initially except that I wanted to include lotus flowers somewhere in the invitation suite (save the dates, invitations or both). I grew up Buddhist and I was an eastern religion major in college, so lotus flowers hold special meaning to me. There are many interpretations of what they can mean, but the one I like the best describes the lotus flower as the progression of the soul. The roots of the flower start in the mud of materialism and suffering, the stem travels through the water representing experience and growth in life, and finally the pristine flower lies above the water signifying enlightenment.

Here are the beautiful designs she came back with:

Option 1:

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After a few weeks of engagement bliss passed, I started the wedding planning process. It started harmlessly with a few wedding magazines and wedding TV shows, but pretty soon I was spending hours every day perusing wedding websites and blogs. With so much information and inspiration I couldn’t help but get excited and maybe a little carried away. I had no idea you could have bird cake toppers, trees for centerpieces and gobos with your own design. Actually, I didn’t even know what a gobo was until I started planning our wedding.

A few weeks into wedding planning, my friend linked me to Nirali Magazine’s wedding section. I think it is one of the best sites for anyone planning a South Asian wedding in North America. I used their shopping guide when I was in India looking for bridal outfits, and was comforted reading their article highlighting interracial marriages. It was also Nirali that led me to my color scheme and invitation designer. I opened an article on invitation trends featuring Saima Khan’s work and was enthralled. (If Saima’s name sounds familiar it’s because she also happened to be Miss Jasmine’s invitation designer.)

One of Saima’s wedding suites:

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We had been dating for almost seven years when Mr. Margarita decided to propose. I knew we were getting close to an engagement when Mr. Margarita suggested our families meet. Though our parents had casually met before at our college graduation, we arranged a formal meeting of the families over dinner at my brother’s house. As I’m sure it is with many cultures, the approval and general happiness of our families was a huge factor in our future together. Neither set of parents had expressed any major concerns about the fact that we were of different cultures and religions so I was mostly nervous about how the families would interact. My mom is loud, vivacious but my Dad is very quiet, soft spoken and generally prefers to do his own thing. Well it turns out that his family is very much the same way so it worked out well. The moms gabbed all night while the dads sat on the couch being entertained by my older brother.
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Hi everyone!

I am so excited to be joining the hive. I’ve been engaged since March 2007 so I’ve been an avid Weddingbee reader for a long time now and I’m truly honored. When I got my email I literally started shrieking and dancing in my chair at work. (I’m working at a hospital right now so I don’t think it was much appreciated.) I’m also happy to be the first cocktail in the hive. I come on the rocks with salt and always promise a good time.

So let me tell you a little bit about how Mr. Margarita and I started. We met freshman year of college at Boston University. Being the nerds that we are, we were both living on pre-med floors in the dorms. My roommate and I were trying desperately to make friends so we ventured to the floor above ours. We walked into the common room and there he was in his pj’s (full on matching striped button up shirt and pants) drinking water straight from a Brita. The details are a little fuzzy since it was eight years ago, but I remember thinking he was strange but hilarious.
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