Comment

Old-fashioned weddings waste time and money

By Wang Wei (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-26 08:02

When my boyfriend, now husband and I started talking about getting married, we had dozens of pictures in mind of how we would celebrate the big day, including bungee jumping, sky diving or planting trees, etc. Having a wedding banquet was never one of them.

In the end, we enjoyed a 10-day honeymoon on a trip to Australia and New Zealand, and we had a great time.

We wouldn't have been able to scuba dive and enjoy the gorgeous Great Barrier Reef with hundreds of tropical fish swimming beside us if we had stayed up nights arranging the seating plans for a banquet.

We wouldn't have been able to feed the cows and sheep on the rolling green farmland on the outskirts of Auckland if we had tried to figure out the niceties of the wedding reception.

I am totally against the idea of wedding banquets because they're not environmentally friendly, they waste a lot of money and, quite frankly, they're boring.

I have attended at least 10 weddings, and except for the bride and groom and the guests, they were all the same.

A respectable person from the husband's side gave a speech to congratulate the new couple and the new couple proposed toasts and then there was excessive drinking and a few people ended up embarrassingly drunk.

My jaw nearly fell on the floor when I saw my best friend's wedding bill. It cost her just under 30,000 yuan for a half-day celebration, which was actually just three hours.

My friend, who doesn't have a car, spent 6,000 yuan just renting the wedding cars - six Mercedes-Benz S600 - that her husband and his family then drove half way round the Fourth Ring Road to pick up the bride.

Many of the drivers behind them blew their horns to complain at their slow speed - a lovely wedding march.

But what I hate the most about the wedding banquet is that it wastes so much food.

There are normally 20 plates piled high with chicken, fish and shrimp and so on, along with rice and all types of pastries, served at a table of 10 people.

If only half of this is consumed, it's not a waste according to the standards of a Chinese wedding banquet.

Based on my experience, 90 percent of the food ends up nourishing garbage bins.

Although holding an extravagant wedding banquet is a long-established tradition for newly-weds in China, many young couples born after 1980 are choosing to take an alternative approach to celebrate the special occasion.

Shanghai Youth Research Center recently conducted a questionnaire on how people born after 1980 choose to get married.

The result shows that 25 percent believed marriage registration was enough, 25 percent wanted a honeymoon, and 17 percent chose a simple family got together.

More and more people have realized a meaningful, unique wedding celebration doesn't have to be a banquet.

Now my cousin is planning to cycle around Qingdao, Shandong province, her husband-to-be's hometown to commemorate their big day.

I'm giving her my best wishes.