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- Red is the traditional colour of luck and good fortune so many Chinese brides wear a red dress
- If that is too daring, Beloved actress Thandi Newton had beautiful red Chinese silk print dresses or ‘cheongsams’ for her bridesmaids who also wore little red thonged slippers and butterflies in their hair
- Give your bridesmaids oriental fans or Chinese lanterns to carry instead of flowers or use these as table centres
- Incorporate a red dragon motif in your wedding stationery or as a cake topper, tie design or waistcoat for your groom
- Incorporate the traditional Chinese horoscope symbol for the year of your wedding in your wedding stationery, table centres, embroidered on your dress or veil or as a cake topping. This works better in a glamorous Year of the Dragon than in a not-so-salubrious Year of the Rat!
- Find out the Chinese symbols for your names and incorporate them in your stationery or as decoration on your cake
- Use traditional jade in your jewellery or gifts to attendants
- Choose a Chinese pagoda shape cake with lotus flowers to decorate
- Hark back to your childhood party goody bags and give paper magic fish as favours or put a message of thanks into a 'red pocket' used at Chinese New Year
- Serve fortune cookies (easy to bake yourselves) filled with good wishes
- At a Chinese wedding banquet, eight dishes are usually served (not including dessert) because the word ‘eight’ in Chinese sounds like “good luck.”
- Waiters usually pass out take-out boxes to the guests because providing too much food represents abundance
- Tea is served at the reception as a sign of respect. The couple usually serves it to each relative who give jewellery and "lucky money" in return
- Fireworks and a lion dance are two Chinese traditions performed at weddings to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck
- Check a Chinese almanac for ‘auspicious dates’ for your wedding day
- Serve food that represent the joining of man and woman in marriage and include an explanation of your choices on the menu. In a Chinese marriage the dragon represents the male, whilst the phoenix is female. A wedding banquet could start with appetizers such as “dragon-phoenix” (or cold food) plates with various sliced meats, jellyfish or nuts shaped like dragons and phoenixes and served chilled. Lobster in Chinese is literally ‘dragon shrimp’ and in Chinese restaurants, chicken feet are referred to as ‘phoenix feet’
- ‘Fish’ sounds like ‘plentiful’ in Chinese so serving fish gives hope for the bridal couple to experience a life of abundance
- Noodles represent longevity in a marriage because they come in long strands!
- At dawn on her wedding day (or the night before), a Chinese bride was bathed in water infused with pumelo, a variety of grapefruit, to cleanse her of evil influences
- In olden times the groom would have dinner with the bride’s family prior to the wedding. He received a pair of chopsticks and two wine goblets wrapped in red paper, symbolic of his receiving the joy of the family in the shape of their daughter
- Sieves are symbolic because they will strain out evil. The best way we can think of including it is by tying it to the back of the wedding car along with the horseshoes and tin cans!
- Give each guest a 'name in Chinese' as a place card. These are a translation of a Western name with the meaning of the Chinese characters, and read something like, ‘your name XXX has 2 characters, XX which means joy and XX which means beauty
- Use rice instead of confetti
- Eat with chopsticks
- Use a red and gold gong to announce dinner
- Chinese Brides have to pour a cup of tea for their would-be-in-laws. If they spill any tea the marriage is off.
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