Category Archives: traditions

Traditions // Luck of the Irish

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we decided to find out a little bit more about Irish wedding traditions. And maybe if you’re planning a St. Patrick’s Day wedding, you’ll be inspired to incorporate some of these traditions in your wedding.

The Claddagh Ring is a original Irish tradition that is a symbol of love, friendship and loyalty. This ring is often passed down from mother to daughter for an engagement. When the crown is facing inward, it’s supposed to symbolize engagement and when the crown is facing outward, it’s supposed to symbolize marriage.

Irish Wedding Blessing:

May God be with you and bless you,
May you see your children’s children,
May you be poor in misfortunes and rich in blessings,
May you know nothing but happiness from this day forward.

Irish Wedding Toast:

May you live as long as you want and never want as long as you live.

At a traditional Irish wedding, the men wear plaid kilts and the bride’s veil is lined with Irish patterned lace. Your groom may not be too keen on going all out and wearing a kilt for your big day, but incorporating Irish lace on your gown, veil or garter is definitely a must for a traditional Irish wedding.

Some brides also choose to carry a handkerchief down the aisle, usually a family heirloom passed down from the grandmother. This is a symbol of family and is often used incorporated into a baby blanket in the future.

If any of those don’t suit you, some brides also carry a horseshoe (turned up) either on her dress, jewelry (such as a necklace or bracelet), or bouquet as a symbol of good luck.

When dinner is served at a traditional Irish wedding, the menu typically includes corned beef, cabbage and topped off with some Guinness. And the dessert? It’s fruitcake!

How to plan a {tasteful} pink wedding

Pink is pretty, romantic and classic … all thing you invision for your wedding, right? The downside is the color pink can be very polarizing and chances are you groom isn’t jumping at the prospect of spending his wedding wallowing in pink: eating a pink cake, wearing a pink shirt and dancing to, well, P!nk. You also don’t want your wedding color to read as too young and immature. You are a grown woman, about to become a Mrs., right?

So here is how to get you guy on board with the color pink and make your big day sophisticated, romantic and classic:

-Perfect pair. Match pink with a sophisticated color to balance out it’s perky personality. Blush tones are still very popular. Fucshia and navy are a preppy, classic combo bursting on to the wedding scene.

-Stategic placement. In order to make pink pop, only have it in strategic, high impact places. You wouldn’t have pink flowers on a pink tablecloth with pink napkins, because it all would blend together. Dub a few items as pink-worthy, and go all out in those select areas. For example: all flowers, desserts, cocktails, ribons and ceiling decorations are pink, but linens, clothing and table decorations are reserved to the accent color.

-Listen to your groom. Talk about you ideas for decor and see what he thinks. Maybe he is totally on board with pink, he just doesn’t want him or his guys to wear it. Or, he’s all about the pink tie, but thinks a cotton candy wedding cake is going too far. It’s all about teamwork and compromise!

Photo by Tin Box Weddings

Bride Blogger // Daddy Daughter

From Miss June:

Nothing makes me more emotional at weddings the the daddy-daughter moments. The moment when he gives her away and the daddy-daughter dance. Janine did an excellent job capturing those moments between my father and I. He’s the best man in the whole entire world and I am so blessed to be his daughter. His speech at our wedding was so touching and I had people coming up to me all night saying they wished they could be friends with my dad, or they wished they will be a dad like that someday, or even that they wish he was their dad! I love him very much and I’ll never forget bawling my eyes out during the daddy-daughter dance as he told me how Brad was the perfect man for me, and that “perfect” was the only way he could think of to describe what he thought of me. I love my dad.

Bride Blogger // Test Run

From Miss June: Oh boy.. test runs. Nothing gives a girl more anxiety than putting what she’s going to be remembered looking like forever into someone else’s hands… or at least it was that way for me! I was so torn between what I wanted to do for my hair… What about half up? Will it get too hot? I want to show off my long hair I’ve been growing out, so if I put it up won’t that defeat the purpose? ….. ahhh! On top of not knowing which style I wanted, I need to find a salon that could fit in 26 people for updo’s before noon. Is that even possible?!

Ohhhh it was. Barely. and I mean BARELY. After a failed test-run at a salon down-town close to the hotel reception site, we decided the best place to go for our large number of updos, price, and professionalism, was Garbo’s at regency. (They even put us on their facebook page! :) )

I wanted one thing for my hair: Big Texas Hair… think pageant-style without the tacky. And by golly, I got just that!! Anyone that knows me, knows that big hair is just… my thing! Maybe I was made for the South, maybe I spent too much time with my family at Horse shows around bedazzled everything growing up.. regardless, I love that big Texas hair.

The test run went well and I was ready for the big day to get here, already! I left the salon, big hair in tact, and went home to get ready for my bachelorette party that night on Cindo de Mayo!

Happy Friday // In the News

The biggest wedding trend seems more like a no-brainer: It’s all about the couple. Instead of sticking to tradition, couples are making sure the ceremony and reception is a reflection of who they are as individuals and as a unit. Here are a few weddings in the news this month that have been true unique celebrations.

You Ya-ting, left, and her partner Huang Mei-yu exchange prayer beads as they are married by a nun in the first Taiwan same sex Buddhist ceremonial wedding in Taoyuan, Taiwan, Saturday, Aug. 11, 2012. Taiwan still does not legally recognize same sex marriage. (AP Photo/Wally Santana)

In this Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2012 photo, Andee Waldie, right, helps paint a directional sign with her brother Bradford and soon to be sister-in-law Megan, in Mesa, Ariz., Five of the eight siblings of the Waldie family will be married to their spouses on Friday, Aug. 10. While trying to plan wedding dates with out-of-state family and guests, dad Doug Waldie suggested they all marry on the same day. (AP Photo/East Valley Tribune, Tim Hacker)

Grant Engler and his new wife, Amanda Engler, celebrate at their wedding ceremony which they arrived for in jet pack suits Thursday, Aug. 23, 2012 in Newport Beach. The 25-year-old former wedding planner from Grand Rapids, Mich., says she wanted a unique ceremony. So the couple donned the (Canadian) $90,000 (C72,000) contraptions on their backs, along with a wetsuit for the groom and white board shorts and a rash-guard shirt for the bride. The jet packs from Jetlev Southwest helped the couple hover a few feet above the water, to the cheers of their wedding guests. Everything went smoothly, except for a kayaker who capsized during the newlyweds’ first dance on the water. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi)

DIY // Our Wedding Mints Obsession

Is a wedding legit without cream cheese mints?

by Rainbow Rowell, published Aug. 26, 2012 in the Omaha World-Herald

Sarah Harvey’s mother approached the topic cautiously. She didn’t want to seem like she was butting in…

“Well, do you want me to make mints for your wedding?” “Mom,” Sarah said, “am I getting married? Come on!”

Of course she wanted cream cheese wedding mints. Is a Nebraska wedding even legal without them? Cream cheese wedding mints are such a part of my nuptial understanding that I wrote them into my first novel, “Attachments” — the main character gets ditched at a wedding and eats 13 mints in one sitting. (Which is practically nothing, am I right?) I didn’t think that I needed to explain what the mints were, or that there would be people in England reading the book and thinking, “Cream cheese what? That sounds disgusting.”

But then someone from Illinois cornered me on Twitter to ask about the mints: “Good Lord,” she tweeted, “is that a THING?” Of course, it’s a THING. Isn’t it a thing everywhere? Doesn’t everyone, everywhere consecrate their unions with delicious globs of cream cheese and powdered sugar? Don’t the little kids crowd around the cake-and-coffee table, sneaking as many of the mints as they can smush in their hands? Don’t all the wedding guests walk around the reception with their tongues dyed the wedding colors? If you don’t have mints, what do you put next to the giant bowl of mixed nuts? What do your aunts do in the weeks before the wedding? (Aunts have to make the wedding mints; it’s required. If anyone else tries to make them, they spoil like day-old manna.)

Apparently, cream cheese wedding mints are a Nebraska thing. Or at least a regional thing. They seem to exist in other places — but not quite so dominantly. And people from other places who haven’t tasted them think they sound … gross. As someone from California put it: “So it’s basically mint-flavored, dried cream cheese frosting?” No!

I mean, yes. But you’re making it sound like a bad thing. Cream cheese wedding mints are delicious. Strangely delicious.

“They taste like the wings of angels,” rhapsodized Kirk Strauser, “held down and dewinged for our snacking pleasure.”

Strauser, a Missouri native, discovered the heavenly mints when he moved to Norfolk, Neb. Butter mints are more popular in Missouri, he said. (Butter? Gross.) Ryann Uden actually grew up in the Nebraska Panhandle, in Crawford, but never experienced cream cheese wedding mints until she met her husband, Stacy, an Omaha native. She was initially skeptical: “Cream cheese and powdered sugar? Seriously?” But in the Uden family, cream cheese mints are a wedding tradition. Everybody gets together a few weeks before the wedding to make them. It’s a social event.

Ryann is such a convert that she held a class in the Chicago library where she works just to share the cream cheese love with her coworkers. Tracking down molds for the class was almost impossible.

“I tried to find them out here (Chicago) and couldn’t find them anywhere. So I had to call Mangelsen’s…” Ah, Mangelsen’s. Where so many cream cheese dreams are born.

The indie craft megastore on 84th Street, just south of Center, has an entire aisle devoted to cream cheese mint molds. They specialize in the individual rubber molds. You can only make one mint at a time with the rubber molds, said longtime employee Linda Fontana, but they’re a lot easier to use than the plastic trays. Mangelsen’s sells about 40 different kinds of molds — “We sell tons,” Fontana said — but the traditional rosette and leaf wedding molds are still the most popular. “We keep a copy of the recipe in the aisle.”

Sarah Harvey did end up with a lovely tray of rosettes and leaves at her May wedding. (In her wedding colors of lavender and green.) But her fiancé, Kevin, balked at the idea of cream cheese at his wedding feast. Kevin doesn’t like cream cheese (Yet Sarah went ahead with the wedding…) Her mom revealed that she could make them with butter instead; her mom even prefers the mints with that way. So Sarah gave in. “You think you know a person…” she said.

Contact the writer: 402-444-1149, rainbow.rowell@owh.com twitter.com/rainbowrowell

Cream Cheese Mints
Recipe courtesy of Mangelsen’s cake department

Combine in bowl:
8 ounces cream cheese (at room temperature)
½ teaspoon LorAnn oil or flavoring —- 2 pounds powdered sugar
Desired food coloring

Mash cheese, add flavoring and color. Mix well. Add powdered sugar and knead with hands until it resembles pie dough. Add more powdered sugar as needed. Roll into marble-size balls. Place them on their sides in a small amount of granulated sugar. Press the sugar side into the mold. Unmold immediately.

Traditions // Swiss Bachelorette Party

From Wedding Essentials editor Chris Christen, on vacation in Swittzerland: Bachelorette parties are called hen parties in the German-speaking region of Switzerland. The tradition is for the bride and her girlfriends to put together little party favors, decorate a small wagon, baskets or pails and then canvas the city asking the public for donations to help pay for the wedding!

We saw these girls at noon and then again at 11 pm! They said they needed photos of 10 bare-chested men by midnight … So my husband and a nephew tore off their shirts in the middle of rush hour traffic to help this bride meet her goal. Fortunately those photos are on another camera card and cannot be shared at this time. Kurt looked like a streaker and Hans got giggles for his resemblance to Justin Bieber.

The dresses are from a bridal boutique in Bern. Original designs by a Swiss woman who gets her silk from Italy. Exquisitely made by hand by Bulgarian seamstresses. The boutique is in the Old Town; which would compare to the Old Market in Omaha.

Check back for more wedding tips from Switzerland. Our editor is abroad for a family wedding and is picking up tons of fun ideas and quirky traditions.

Traditions // What is a Wedding House Party?