Monday 8 August 2011

Do we need to spend a lot of money for wedding?

Wedding is one of the most important ceremony in every culture or traditional in every part of the world with their own styles. Wedding day is very exciting, panic, or many feeling to the brides and the grooms because they desire and expect the perfect wedding. I have had better understanding for wedding trend when I read the article "The cost of Wedding Spirals in China" (Presly, 2011).


In the article, Presly told that every year in China more than ten million couples get married. Wedding are multi-million-dollar bussiness and expense for the big day can quickly spirals out of control. Many couples have to pay for many things, for example, diamond ring, the wedding banquet, etc. However, there have been a lot of arguments from financial persons that couples should not spend money a lot for only a moment of the wedding day, they would better put it forwards buying a house, retirement, buying insurance. Some of them proposed that even wedding are very important in Chinese culture but couples should think about their financial goal as well.

Wedding is also important for Thai culture especially for bride's family because it represent the respect to them and also to their ancestors. Moreover, wedding also declares the status of couple in social. I mean after wedding people will recognize that they are not single anymore. In Thailand, wedding also consumes a lot of money from couple because it means the face of them and their family. They have many things to pay; diamond ring, wedding planner, organiser, hotel, etc. Even all those things are needed for wedding, but we should concern about the financial status. Couple should not spend most money for just one day 'wedding day', they'd better concern a rest of live after wedding day which need money to set up their life.
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References

Presly, Linda. (2011, July 22). The cost of Wedding Spirals in China. The BBC News. Retrived August 8, 2011 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/bussiness-14208448

5 comments:

  1. The article sounds interesting. I definitely agree that a wedding is a money-consuming ceremony. Moreover, it seems likely that a marriage trend in Thailand will be changed in years to come. Since people become more individual and sophisticated, they often regard an extravagant wedding as an old-styled ceremony. In fact, i have many friends who decided to start their life as spouse without marriage. A true love is not necessary to include a significant number of guests attending a wedding as a witness and superfluous spending towards an event to declare one's financial status. It is just the way people who love each other so much want to create the most important unit of society, a family.

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  2. Dew,
    It's a very timely post. It fits in well with the topic of cultural anthropology which we are studying in Quest, and the ideas in your response especially should be useful for our discussion tomorrow morning.

    Dew's post also reminded me of the weddings in my family when I was a child. Whenever an aunt or uncle, or older cousin, married, there was an elaborate wedding, complete with church service in formal dress, followed by a sumptuous wedding breakfast - though why a banquet for hundreds of people served in the evening is called a "breakfast" I don't know. Anyway, it was the breakfast bit that I loved (dressing up was fun, but the feast was the real winner) - my brothers and sisters and our young cousins would eat, and eat and eat, especially ice-cream, pies, cake, pudding and other favourites that we were normally only allowed to eat in modest quantities. And so far from telling us not to, our doting aunts would positively encourage our pigging out on desserts. And grown a little older, we could sneak a fair amount of alcohol.

    I think that both the excessive eating and the sneaking of alcohol by children are traditional at Italian weddings - my relatives all seemed pretty tolerant of them anyway. Although very busy eating, drinking, dancing and generally having fun themselves, I'm pretty sure that our parents still had a good idea what we were getting up to.

    And for Italian families, the bride's father traditionally paid for everything, which must have been a bit of worry. I don't think my brothers are planning to follow that tradition quite so lavishly as my father did when my sisters married.

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  3. My normal childhood breakfast was cereal with fresh milk (from our own cows), salami or bacon with fried eggs, and toast. It was nothing like the wedding type of breakfast. And there was only immediate family present, not hundreds of relatives and close friends. Nor did anyone ever drink wine at breakfast - although my parents and any guests did normally have wine with dinner, and sometimes special lunches.

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  4. As a woman, the wedding day is the one of most important day in people's life especially for woman, so people want to have the perfectly wedding, they don't want to have any mistake in that they. From this reason, people have to spend more time and more money for their wedding. In fact, the thing that more important than wedding day is life after marriage. If we have a very very perfectly wedding day, but after that we have a lot of problems in life after marriage, it doesn't have advantages. Therefore, we should balance between two thing what is more useful for your couple.

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  5. Dew,
    It is a very good topic and I am sure even our classmates will have different opinions. Wedding Day is a big day, if your financial status allows you to spend lots of money on it, it will be the best. But if you only have small amount of money in the bank account and you still have to consider about buying your own apartment,paying for medication, or saving money for further education. It is ok just get married without the big Wedding Day. It is love that made marriage lasts long, not the ceremony.

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