Is the wedding ceremony or wedding dinner more important?
For me, hands down, it’s the ceremony – that moment when you say your vows and you are married in the eyes of God and in the eyes of man, is sacred. More significant than signing on that official piece of paper, when you get married under the covering and blessing of the church, it has a special and profound significance which can be felt beyond the physical, emotional and mental; it is experienced in the spirit.
It’s important that that I get to share this experience with the friends and family I love, and this is how I want to remember my wedding.
When it comes down to the dinner, to be honest, I don’t really care if I didn’t have it at all. I did it for the sake of honouring both sides of parents and relatives, and I didn’t mind doing it.
But in terms of priority, since I hold the ceremony in far greater weightage, one of the ways you can manage your spending in your wedding is to be ruthless if you need to be especially when you’re looking at RM100 a head minimum nowadays at a hotel.
The ceremony itself is relatively cheap – we got the hall for free since we were church members, paid RM2,000 for the luncheon which was enough for everyone and then allocated ‘ang paus’ for those who helped out. This type of costing is easy to save and plan for.
But when it comes down to the dinner, let’s say you have 40 tables on average with RM1,000 for a table of 10 seats – the cost is immediately RM40,000. That’s a lot.
There’s always going to be family and relatives that will need to come but in terms of friends or even distant relatives, it can be rather risky to invite them for the sake of courtesy. Too many wedding couples fall into debt because of this ‘courtesy’ and starting off your marriage in debt is the worst thing you could do for each other; financial pressure is not something you want to unnecessarily burden yourselves with.
At the same time, oftentimes, these friends and distant relatives may not even really want to come, and may feel burdened by the numerous wedding invites where they have to come and ‘pay’ for a very expensive dinner. However, this is a secondary reason and it’s more for the wedding couple that they should be selective in who they invite.
This is unless the parents are covering the whole meal or you’re extremely well off. Otherwise, properly planning out who you invite will enable you to hedge against having to pay for the dinner, and may even enable you to come out on top, in some cases, quite a bit richer.
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