Monday, January 5, 2009

Cultural values of traditional Vietnamese wedding by SGGP

LIFESTYLE
Tuesday , Dec 30, 2008, Posted at: 17:46(GMT+7)

Cultural values of traditional Vietnamese wedding

The traditional Vietnamese wedding is one of the most important ceremonies in Vietnamese culture.

A Vietnamese traditional wedding. (Photo: Vu Khanh)

It consists of an engagement ceremony taking place usually half a year or so before the wedding. A marriage ceremony includes asking permission to ‘receive’ the bride, receiving the bride at her house, bringing the bride to the groom's house, and the reception for the bride and groom's family and friends.

Traditional symbols of Vietnamese marriage are a couple of pigeons, betel leaves and areca nut and the indispensable words "song hy” (double joys). This phrase as Chinese characters 囍 shows the joy for the both families.

At the wedding, members of both families often wear ao dai (Vietnamese traditional dress) and khan dong (headdress). The bride and groom’s attire are brighter and more brilliant than everyone else’s.

The marriage ceremony is held in front of the ancestor altars at homes of both families. On the morning of the wedding day, the groom’s family will bring gifts, including betel leaves and areca nuts, wine, tea, fruits, cakes, a roasted pig and a pair of big dragon and phoenix candles which are placed in boxes covered in red cloth.

Candle lighting is one of the most important rites. An old man who has a good manner of speaking and high status in the family will represent the groom's house to burn the candles and pray for happiness, luck and prosperity.

The light represents life, faith, wisdom, love, and earth and sky. After which, the couple’s thoughts shall be for each other rather than for themselves. Their joys and sorrows shall be shared alike.

The marriage ceremony is held in front of the ancestor altars at home of both families.
(Photo Vu Khanh)

The groom and bride will exchange wedding rings. The groom’s mother gives her daughter-in-law jewelry, including gold bracelets, earrings and other valuable gifts. Members of the two families will also wish the newly wedded couple a long and happy life and offers them presents and money.

After bringing the bride to the groom's house, an elderly kind-hearted woman who has a happy life and many descendants will spread a sedge mat on the couple’s bed in order to bring luck.

Today, a Vietnamese wedding organized according to traditional manners and customs has gradually fallen into oblivion. It only exists in a few rural areas.

Most modern Vietnamese weddings reduce some traditional ceremonies. The reception occurs immediately after the procession ceremony, often at a restaurant or a banquet hall in the afternoon or evening, instead of taking place at either couple's house.

The couple will be recognized in law as husband and wife after receiving the marriage certificate. However, according to national culture, the wedding with the attendance of both families, all relatives, friends, and neighbors is conclusive proof to recognize them as a married couple.

Nowadays a lot of Vietnamese couples have been influenced by Western styles, including wearing white wedding dresses and black tuxedos. But they still choose Vietnamese traditional wedding costumes for traditional ceremonies.

Vietnamese traditional weddings attract many foreign visitors. A problem with a modern wedding is that the party does not usually take place on time. It takes 1-2 hours to receive guests and then the wedding ceremony can start.

By Staff writers – Translated by Vu Khanh

http://www.saigon-gpdaily.com.vn/Lifestyle/2008/12/67486/

VietNamese Wedding Ceremony by Vietnam-Beauty

Vietnamese wedding ceremony

04/01/2009, 08:30

The traditional Vietnamese wedding is one of the most important ceremonies in Vietnamese culture with influence from Confucian and Buddhist ideologies. It is a significant day not only to the couple involved but also for both families. Thus, it usually includes quite a few formal ritual observances.

Depending on habits of specific ethnic groups, marriage includes various steps and related procedures, but in general, there are two main ceremonies:

Le an hoi (betrothal ceremony):

Normally, both bride and groom or their parents go to the fortuneteller to see what date and time is best for them. They strongly believe in this date and time so the groom's family and relatives must come on time. Some days before the wedding, they will visit the bride and her family with round lacquered boxes known as betrothal presents. It composes of areca nuts and betel leaves, tea, cake, fruits, wines and other delicacies which covered with red cloth and carried by unmarried girls or boys.

Le cuoi (wedding ceremony):

On the wedding day, the groom's family and relatives go to the bride's house bringing a lot of gifts wrapped in red papers. These gifts are similar to those of the engagement: betel leaves and areca nuts, wines, fruits, cakes, tea ... The persons hold these trays are also carefully chosen, usually they are happily married couples. Ladies and women are all dressed in Ago Dai. Men could be in their suits or men traditional Ao Dai. The troop is usually led by a couple that is most wealthy and successful among the relatives, this means to wish the to-be-wed couples a blessing life together in the future.

The groom's family would stop in front of the bride's house. The leading couple should enter the house first with a tray with wine. They would invite the bride's parents to take a sip. By accepting the toast, the bride's family agrees for the groom’s family to enter their house. The firework is immediately fired to greet the groom's family.

The groom's family would introduce themselves and ask permission for their son to marry his bride. The master of the ceremony (usually a respected person among the bride's relatives) instructs the bride's parents to present their daughter. The bride then follows her parents out. She will wear red traditional wedding ao dai, followed by her bride maids. The couple should pray before the altar ask their ancestors for permission for their marriage, then express their gratitude to both groom’s and bride’s parents for raising and protecting them.

Then, they bow their head to each other to show their gratitude and respect toward their soon-to-be husband or wife. The master of the ceremony would gave the wedding couple advices on starting a new family. Their parents would take turn to share their experience and give blessing. After that, the groom and the bride exchange their wedding rings and receive the gifts from their parents such as golden bracelets, ear rings, necklace... The ceremony is ended with a round applause.

After the wedding ceremony is over, there will be a party at the groom's house. Some traditional Vietnamese wedding party is celebrated at their houses (usually in country-side); other is celebrated in the restaurant. This day is the culmination of desires, day dreams, hopes and anxieties. There is a band to play music during their meal. Some guests are free to sing related wedding songs on the stage to luck the bride and the groom. In the middle of the party, the couple goes to each table to get wishes, congratulations as well as money.

Today, a lot of Vietnamese couples have their wedding ceremony done in Temples or Churches which is very much similar to American and Western style, including exchanging vows and wedding rings. However, they still maintain Vietnamese traditional ceremony in the bride's home before heading to temples or churches.

Rol.vn - Source: Vietnam-Beauty

Friday, December 26, 2008

Recession on Wedding Budget

December 21, 2008

Field Notes

Recession? Time to Slash the Flower Budget

By NINA REYES

PITY Lauren Huber, 27, a Baltimore bride-to-be who began planning her wedding 12 months ahead only to see the economic downturn force her to forgo not just the icing on the cake, but the cake itself.

Her fiancé, Ryan Priem, who is 28 and a salesman, saw his income drop, and the couple found themselves spending the $35,000 set aside for their March 2009 wedding on everyday living expenses. They began trimming costs from every aspect of their event.

The big hotel to which they had committed early in the process suddenly seemed unaffordable. So Ms. Huber sold her $3,400 Amsale dress on Craigslist and plans to wear a less costly one. She canceled the morning-after brunch, cut a half-hour off the photographer’s services and halved the size of the bouquets. Finally, she canceled the cake, as dessert is already included in the dinner she ordered.

“We can do without,” she said. “Dessert is tiramisù, so we’ll get pictures of us slicing that instead.”

She’s hardly alone. As the financial condition of the country worsens, the wedding industry, so long considered recession-proof, is seeing fairy-tale weddings stripped of their sprites, their sparkle and everything else that suggests splurge.

Some couples are slashing guest lists to include just immediate family and very dear friends, leaving aunts, cousins and the friends of friends out entirely, and bridal consultants say that they are seeing more couples postponing their events until they can be more certain they will have the money to pay for the wedding they want. Others are ratcheting up plans for quick, simple weddings that allow them to more readily take advantage of a safety net woven from the government and corporate benefits available to married couples.

Still other couples, armed with the skills they learned in a go-go economy, are trying to forcefully renegotiate with vendors to keep some semblance of their ideal wedding.

One bride had put down a deposit and locked into a contract with a site in a town south of Philadelphia, where she and her fiancé live. Given the amount of debt piling up from their graduate school studies, she suddenly thought that the $30,000 to $40,000 she had planned to spend on her wedding seemed ridiculous.

Furthermore, the downturn in the economy left the bridegroom’s parents unable to provide as much financial support as the couple had hoped for. And although the wedding venue has been accommodating, it is not willing to make a refund. The bride is now aiming for something in the under-$20,000 range. To get there she has cut the number of people she has invited from 200 to 115, and made her wedding dinner a less costly luncheon, hoping to save another $30 to $40 a person.

“You can negotiate prices with any wedding vendor,” said Kristal Joiner, the wedding coordinator at Event Source Northwest in Kirkland, Wash., a company that has seen plenty of clients seek to do just that recently. But businesses like Ms. Joiner’s, which specialize in supplying disc jockeys and masters of ceremonies, are also caught in an economic squeeze.

“We understand that people don’t have as much money these days,” Ms. Joiner said. “We can cut back on hours, or we can do a couple less speakers, or we’ll throw in an extra hour.” However, she added, “We have to charge what we’re worth and make money, so it’s a little difficult.”

The same economic forces that are encouraging couples to trim their expectations may actually be encouraging more of them to marry sooner, if less expensively. Some who earn their livelihoods in the wedding business report that they are seeing more couples opt for hurry-up weddings that will allow them to claim married-filing-jointly status on their income taxes for 2008.

“Whereas last year I did 197 weddings, this year I’m up to 299 weddings,” said the Rev. Marie April Gismondi, a nondenominational minister with the Church of Ancient Ways in Babylon, N.Y. “I’d say a lot more of them are those quick-I-want-to-get-married-this-week weddings."

To be sure, a certain number of couples each year schedule their unions to take advantage of the tax break. “December is a kind of funny month,” said Sari Venegas-Skalnik, a bridal consultant in Guaynabo, P.R., who recently has had three couples come to her with plans for weddings on short notice. “We get a lot of last-minute pop-ups. People who say, ‘I’m already going on vacation, what do I have to do to get married?’ ”

But Ms. Gismondi, who is also the vice president of the American Association of Wedding Officiants, said she’s seeing an unusual spike for some simple economic reasons. One bride, she said, “who was paying $400 and change a month on her health insurance,” told her that by marrying she would save nearly $5,000 a year in premium payments.

Getting out of town can have its advantages, too. Susan Alexander Shapiro, the owner of BravoBride (bravobride.com), a Web site for the purchase and sale of new and used wedding items, said that some couples who had planned large formal weddings “now are doing destination weddings because it’s cheaper.”

“Typically there are fewer guests,” she said, and “some places will even offer a ‘free wedding’ if you stay at their resort, which means they will throw in the cake, Champagne, bridal bouquets and more.” But even those who have not yet felt the sharp bite of the economy’s incisors have been chastened.

“They don’t want to look ostentatious,” said JoAnn Gregoli, a wedding planner who is also the New York metropolitan coordinator for the Association of Bridal Consultants. “They say, ‘Make it simple.’ You don’t want to be there promoting your wealth to people who don’t have it.”

She pointed out that the industry’s woes have created opportunities, too.

“It’s a buyer’s market if you’re still getting married and you have the money,” she said.

Andi Vance, a 31-year-old bride-to-be from Chicago, has used the recession to put her priorities in order. She began planning for her September 2009 wedding with a budget in the $15,000 to $25,000 range, but when the economy began to falter, she decided a down payment on a house was more important to her than a dream wedding.

So instead of the $5,000 venue, she booked a cabin for $150 at Malabar Farm, a state park in Lucas, Ohio. She also decided to use flowers from her mother’s garden and intends to have a hometown friend take pictures.

She is now searching for a secondhand dress. And in a perfect marriage of technology and parsimony, in lieu of a band she is going to hook up an iPod to a speaker system.

“We’ll be able to do it for under $10,000,” she said of her event. “Right now, we just need to save money. The wedding is one day. The house is going to last a lot longer than that.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/fashion/weddings/21FIELD.html

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Picking wild flowers has always been my back up plan. It reminds me of when I used to cut the roses in my neighbor's yard. Their flowers were over blooming and pretty hot and tempting.