Wedding favours are small gifts given by the bride and groom, to their guests, during a wedding ceremony or wedding reception. These gifts are given as a gesture of appreciation or gratitude, or a memento to remember the day. They have become traditional in some Western cultures.
As a wedding guest, you’ll often find one as part of your place setting when you sit down to eat the wedding breakfast.
The tradition of distributing wedding favours is hundreds of years old. It is believed that the first wedding favour, common amongst European aristocrats, was known as a bonbonniere, a small trinket box that was made of crystal, porcelain or precious stones. The contents of these precious boxes were generally sugar cubes or delicate confections, which symbolised wealth and royalty.
As sugar became more affordable, sugar cubes were replaced by sugar-coated almonds as this became the standard wedding favour for hundreds of years.
Today, gifts to guests are commonly known as wedding favours and are shared in cultures worldwide, having become an accepted part of wedding reception planning, especially in the United States and Canada but also here in the UK.
Modern favours are diverse and usually complement the theme or season of the event or are in some way connected to the personalities of the couple getting married. Classic favours can range from the classic sugared almonds originally distributed by European aristocrats hundreds of years ago; to individual chocolates or candles and scented soaps.
Modern gift trends include small personalised gifts or a charitable donation in the name of their guests.
For more wedding favour ideas, check out our related blog posts and browse our online store.
At Wedding SuperMarket, we have a wide range of wedding favours available to order online.
Choosing your wedding venue is one of the most important decisions you will make during the wedding planning process, so in this article we give you are best advice on how to choose a wedding venue.
Your choice of venue will both impact the composition of your wedding photography as well as determine the date on which you’ll actually get married. Here are some of the factors you may want to keep in mind while making your decision.
Where do you want to get married? You probably have some ideas. Whether it’s round the corner from your house or in another country, you’re doing to need to find a venue in that area.
Sure, you could use Google. But Wedding SuperMarket’s search engine was designed specifically to help you find wedding venues. As such, we provide a lot of information that Google doesn’t. Simply type the name of the location in our search engine and we’ll only show you wedding venues in that area. You can search the entire UK.
For many, cost is likely to be one of the primary considerations. This needs little discussion. You need to choose somewhere that you can afford.
With Wedding SuperMarket, choosing a wedding venue in your budget is very simple and straightforward. Simple use the budget slider when searching for a wedding venue and we’ll only show you results that fit your budget.
You may also find yourself having to make choices you perhaps don’t want to make based on the policies of certain venues. For example, some wedding venues insist you use their in-house catering. This may give you limited choices when it comes to deciding what you want to serve at your wedding breakfast.
For example, if you’re having a mixed-heritage or Asian wedding, and serving Indian food is important because it’s what many of your guests will expect, you may have to decide against a particular venue if they will not satisfying your catering needs.
Another important practical question to ask is whether the venue can accommodate your guest list. If you’re having a small wedding, this is unlikely to be a problem but if you’re inviting hundreds of people, you’ll need to be sure that your venue has the capacity. Equally, if you have a particular venue or aesthetic in mind, you’re going to need to find a venue which meets both criteria. This can be a source of frustration because you cannot send out invitations until after you’ve booked the venue.
You can simply set your required capacity when running a wedding venue search and we’ll only show you venues that are big enough to accommodate your guest list.
There are all kinds of wedding venues. There are large country houses surrounded as far as the eye can see by rolling hills and countryside, and there are modern, inner city, glass and metal hotels and skyscrapers. There are also castles, palaces or foreign destinations you may want to consider.
The aesthetic of your venue will influence the kind of wedding you have. Choose an aesthetic you like. It will also be what appears in the background of all of your wedding photos.
Choosing your wedding venue is a personal decision. And if compromises need to be made, you and your spouse will need to be clear about what is important to you.
Wedding SuperMarket’s venue search allows you to filter your search to help you quickly find a venue that will cater to your needs. We hope it helps you. That’s why we built it.
If you have any further questions about how to choose a wedding venue, drop us a comment below.
Getting married can be expensive. In fact, for most people, it’s likely to be the most expensive day of your life. The average wedding in the UK costs between £26,000-32,000! That’s a lot of money! So if you’re having to trim back your dream wedding in order to have something practical and affordable, let’s have a look at what’s actually worth spending money on and what’s not…
Most brides have been dreaming about their wedding dress since they were children. So it’s not going to be something that you perhaps want to compromise on. The good news is that there are wedding dresses made for every budget level and also that a very pretty wedding dress need not necessarily break the bank. And the savings you make on a dress that you will probably only wear once can be huge.
At the end of the day, this particular decision is yours.
The photographs of your wedding day are likely to be the longest lasting thing from your wedding day. In many cases they’ll last longer than your spouse! And here’s a statistic for you – going cheap on wedding photography is one of the most frequently regretted decisions by newly-wed couples. So it’s probably advisable not to cut costs here and to hire a wedding photographer who you are confident will do a good job and meet your expectations.
At the end of the day entertainment is what makes a party a party and your guests may attend many weddings or other types of parties all year round. The challenge with any wedding is to make it stand out and wedding entertainment is a great way of doing that. For your reception, you’re going to have to hire either a DJ or a live band for the evening. And during your drinks reception, having a close-up magician walking around performing to your guests can be a fantastic touch. We don’t recommend cutting corners on entertainment because if it’s really good, it’s something your guests are likely to remember for a long time.
Wedding cakes can be very artistic. Some of the wedding cakes we’ve seen are quite honestly a wonder to behold. The question is whether or not that justifies spending £500+ on it. Often the answer is no. Tell me – can you remember a wedding cake from any wedding you’ve been to recently? We don’t recommend spending a fast amount on a wedding cake if you can’t afford to.
Our strategy is pretty clear – spend the money on the things you can’t live with our and the things you and your guests are going to remember. When all is said and done, what is a wedding celebration about if not creating shared memories?
How you ultimately decide to spend your budget is your decision. But we hope we’ve helped to shine some light on some of the costs that might be worth cutting and others that you might want to keep.
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