20 Feb 2011

Wan's wedding preparations

My second son - Ridzuan is getting married in April - months earlier than he expected. A  normal Malay wedding is full of tradition and needs a lot of preparation before hand - for some even the engagement ceremony is again full of age old customs and traditions. There's the merisik ceremony, in which the groom's parents goes to the bride's house to formally propose. In this ceremony, the groom's parents will normally bring a ring as a sign of intent. After the usual chit chat and social niceties, the parents will broach the subject to the girl's parents. If the parents agree, then a dowry and an engagement date is  set.  

In Wan's case everything was made easy by Emma's family  and we agreed to have the wedding in April. Since then, every weekend has busy for me. This week it's putting on the final touches for the door gifts - the thank you cards. I'm glad nowadays we can get almost everything ready made. We bought all the gifts a few weeks back at Nilai. What with teaching and rushing around getting the preparations done, I'm left with very little time to read or  with anything else. As with most Malay weddings , we will have the  bersanding ceremony where the bride and groom sit on a dais and receive blessings from their family and friends. The dais or pelamin is a raised platform upon which the young married couple will sit. They will be dressed resplendently in wedding finery and the dais will be decorated to make it look like a throne. After blessing the couple, guests will receive a token, normally an egg to symbolise the fertility of the marriage.  All preparations will be done by the family of the bride and groom ( ie. the mother) and there is literally tons to do. The flowers to be ordered, door gifts to be prepared, the dais, the wedding finery, the food to be catered or cooked... guest list to be drawn up and invited. The mother is wedding planner, financial advisor, gift buyer, postman and flower arranger.

This is a picture of the dais that we have to prepare in the typical Malay wedding. I'll post actual pictures later!

This is the dais or pelamin on which the bride and groom will sit


I may complain about having no time to pursue my favourite activities but I'm excited and happy. After all, it's not every day that my son is getting married! However I still have time to read ! Just finished one book in fact - Then Comes Seduction by Mary Balogh, another Huxtable family saga. But I'll tell you about it later.

2 comments:

The Bookworm said...

Wow Kat, how exciting! You must be very busy now. The dais you are preparing looks gorgeous!!
Congratulations and good luck with everything :)

Kat said...

Thanks Naida, of course its a biig headache! Wish you could come - but I'll post pictures later