Stuff Nobody Tells You About Weddings Part Three: Favours

You'll spend ages choosing/crafting/lovingly tying ribbon around them.

You'll be certain everybody will want to take one home.

But still, somehow there will be A LOT left behind. IT DOESN'T MEAN YOUR FAVOURS ARE CRAP.

Image by Aspect Photography

It just means people are forgetfully drunk and/or don't fully understand the concept of favours. One of the first times I went to a wedding as an adult, all the guests got given a beautiful selection of chocolate truffles, delicately presented and boxed by hand. I could not get OVER the fact that this awesome couple had paid for an amazing party and an insanely good three course meal and were now GIVING ME CHOCOLATES. Shouldn't I be giving them chocolates? To say thank-you for such a lovely time? Obviously I ate the chocolates. They were very good. But it didn't make the concept any less topsy-turvey in my head.

Even more recently than that, I went to a wedding where the couple had scattered hundreds of miniature pots of jam everywhere for people to take home.  I took two. They  were so cute and I really didn't know if I should be taking two. Maybe I should take one. I am only one person, after all. Though, I do like jam. BUT IT FELT LIKE I WAS STEALING THEM. I had guilt every time I opened the fridge.

It was really good jam.

Maybe this says more about my latent anxiety than it does about favours, or you, or your wedding.

Image - http://media.photobucket.com/image/jam+favours+/alex_peploe123/wedding-jam-favor-ideas.jpg

Still, I am positive there will be some wedding guests who have a similar "surely not for me?" bamboozlement when faced with being given a gift for coming to a party. Let's face it, the last time some of us will have experienced this will have been at the age of six, when we trotted home from Claire Riley's birthday party with a plastic bag containing mini-Lovehearts, a party blower and a Thundercats pencil.

Of course, most people will just get drunk and forget to take their favour home. We made our own wedding fanzine for people to take as a memento, and even though we made 3/5ths of what we actually needed, we still came home with the box half full. But -gratifyingly -since the wedding,  people have sobbed that they forgot to take theirs and begged to be posted one (no great surprise - there was a wordsearch in it and everything. They probably went home, realised they'd forgotten their copy and LITERALLY kicked themselves. Hard. Good, because I'm getting the postage back off them next time I see them.).

So here are some things you can do to help your silly but lovely guesticles take the favours home you spent hours making, and still have blisters from:

 Image by Greg Blomberg

-Edible favours (see above) are clearly for immediate consumption

-Place favours on or next to people's place settings at the meal to make it completely clear that THIS IS FOR THEM

-If your item is remotely decorative it is likely to fly under the "gift" radar, even if it has your guest's name on it. It may be then worthwhile recruiting a useful minion to instruct everybody that they can take their favour home with them (if you're likely to be upset when they don't)

-If the favours are in a communal area for people to take, make some pretty signs to make it obvious that you want them to be taken. People like being instructed. It gives them a clear sense that they are not stealing things.

-If worst comes to worst, just make sure your favours are something you're happy to have a house full of after the wedding...

 

Chocolate brownie pops for tea again tonight, my love? Don't mind if I do...