As regular readers to the blog will know, I’m not a fan of hen parties. Well, that’s not strictly true. I don’t actively hate them, but I really do despise the way what were originally intimate celebrations between close friends have somehow morphed into money-sucking, time-consuming, spirit-draining weekends of madness throughout which everyone involved is expected to pay through the nose to go places they didn’t want to go and do things they didn’t want to do, often with people they barely know. Eugggh. But I fully realise that I’ve spoken about this TO DEATH on the blog already, so I’ll spare you the rant for a second (or third) time. Because what I want to say is that I actually had a really good hen party experience at the weekend (I know, who’d have thought it right?!).

For one thing, the henny in question was held in Edinburgh, so I immediately escaped the expense of having to travel halfway across the country, and the added annoyance of paying to stay in a hotel once I got there. I stayed home for the entire weekend (bliss), skipped the Friday night dinner in favour of the footie and confined my participation in the celebrations to the Saturday. Now THAT’S more like it!

And the Saturday activity was actually a really good laugh. We went to a cocktail-making class at a trendy bar here in Edinburgh, where we were taught how to construct four of the most popular cocktails around from scratch (Woo Woo, Mojito, Cosmopolitan and White Russian – YUM), taste LOTS of them, and get behind the bar to have a go at the old shaking ourselves. It was an absolute blast, and my appreciation of the art of cocktail making has rocketed as a result. The barman in charge told us that he has to keep the recipes for 30 different cocktails right at the forefront of his mind, all the time. And to make sure his knowledge is in perma-tip-top condition, his employer makes him take an exam every few months(!) If he doesn’t achieve a result of 95% or over in the exam, he’s banned from working on the bar. How harsh is that?!

I was seriously impressed by the whole thing, and as a hen party activity it was really, really fun, and I actually took a lot away from it. The class was £25 per person, so it wasn’t the cheapest thing in the world (and I’m definitely not advocating it over rounders in the park followed by cheap, home-made grub) but for the amount of tuition we got, the alcohol we consumed and the fun we had, I think it was definitely worth it. Masterclasses are available all over the place – just contact your nearest/most preferred cocktail bar for details.

Image above from Flickr – lergik.

While reading yesterday’s Sunday Times Style magazine this morning (which I can do because, y’know, I’m on holiday and all that) I noticed a reader letter about wedding lists – the subject of last Friday’s post here on TC. Here it is in full:

“I am attending a wedding in the summer, and the bride and groom, while saying “Your presence is enough”, have given details of an upmarket online travel company, so that contributions may be made towards the cost of their honeymoon. I have, over the years, spent a small fortune on John Lewis gift-list purchases of china and crystal, however, I find it rather distasteful to be asked to contribute cash towards a honeymoon, especially when they do not even have the decency to say what we would be contributing towards. I have no idea whether they are planning on spending their honeymoon building an orphanage in Rwanda, or gorging themselves on pina coladas on the Costa del Sol. If I do not wish to give cash towards the holiday, do you think it would be acceptable to give a honeymoon gift, such as a good book to read on the beach or earplugs?”**

This letter appears on the ‘Mrs Mills’ page of the magazine which, as any regular readers will know, is pretty tongue-in-cheek at the best of times (in fact, it’s usually downright hilarious). But the underlying theme of the question is an interesting one. Is it acceptable to mandate that your guests contribute towards the cost of your honeymoon in lieu of a material wedding gift?

My initial guess is that if you decide that dictating to your wedding guests is an acceptable thing to do in the first place then asking for cash contributions to your honeymoon is actually quite a smart idea – particularly if the couple concerned already lives together and has no need for traditional wedding presents a la John Lewis’ over-priced, aspirational consumer chattels. Perhaps having guest contributions means that a couple can afford to go on the honeymoon of their dreams or, in some cases, that they can go on a honeymoon at all. Which isn’t really something I’m inclined to sniff at, truth be told.

On the other hand, if you are stubbornly opposed to the idea of the wedding list in the first place (as a not-insubstantial part of me is) then the chances are you’re probably equally, if not more, appalled by the prospect of being asked to stuff a few tenners in a card to bankroll someone else’s jaunt abroad, even if that someone else is your best friend, sibling, boss etc. I can relate to this – call me a prude all you will but there’s something about the thought of being asked for nothing other than money that sits rather uneasily with me. I’ve never been into either the giving or the receiving money as presents at all – I usually think it’s a bit of a cop out of the time and effort it takes to give someone the perfect gift – ‘I saw this wad of notes and thought of you dear.’ Charmed, I’m sure.

So again, I’m not sure which camp I fall into here. While I’m firmly in favour of the idea of giving experience-based gifts as opposed to material ones, there’s something telling me that slipping some cash into an envelope with the words ‘Bon Voyage’ written on the back is most emphatically not the solution to the wedding list problem, even if you are told exactly where the money is going and what it will be used for. Perhaps by the time I come to get married myself I will have formed a more concrete opinion on the subject of wedding lists. Or perhaps I will adopt what is undeniably the best idea I’ve heard so far. Apparently some friends of Holly @ Shopaholly asked their guests to give a single copy of their favourite book as a wedding present so that they could get their collection going. I have to say, this is probably one of the most charming things I’ve heard in a while – it really does warm my heart to know that, contrary to everything I’ve read and heard about £400 toasters, matching side plates and five types of bath towel, there are still people out there who are actively willing to do things differently when it comes to planning their nuptials. Good on them.

That, I think, brings wedding week to a close. I’ve not covered absolutely everything – I’d probably have ended up smothering myself with the nearest pile of organza if I’d gone on much longer – but I at least hope I’ve done enough to make it clear that getting married doesn’t have to mean that thrift suddenly takes a back-seat to financial promiscuity. In fact, it is now becoming my solid belief that the thriftiest weddings can be the most beautiful, the most original and by far the most memorable. In my book at least, over-the-top hen parties, mono-style designer dresses and John Lewis wedding lists are each over-rated, unimaginative and above all, expensive. Undertake any or all at your financial, creative and spiritual peril!

**For anyone who’s interested, Mrs Mills’ reply took the following, ever-so-slightly sardonic form:

“This is a deplorable trend, almost as bad as those people who expect you to sponsor them for a charity bike ride across Barbados in aid of the Help the Orphaned Donkey Fund. Do not give in. Buy them a toaster and eat the receipt.”

Image above courtesy of Flickr – vipeldo.

My friends who got married in November had never lived together before their nuptials.  In fact, the Groom lived at home with his parents (and, so I’m told, had his packed lunch made every morning before work by his Dad)!  Their wedding day therefore signified not only the start of their married life, but also the beginning of their living together.  In order to furnish their newly purchased marital love nest and to get them off to a good start in terms of having enough pots and pans, tea towels and bed linen to survive the first few months of their cohabiting life, the couple in question registered a John Lewis wedding gift list.  I was round there for dinner on Wednesday evening and blimmin’ eck, didn’t they do well out of it!  The house is a shrine to John Lewis’s finest and it’s lovely, albeit not really to my taste (it’s all just a bit too new if you get my meaning).  Truth be told, I’m slightly terrified of breaking something or spilling tea on their new cream carpets.

So wedding lists.  Good thing?  Bad thing?  Devil’s spawn?  There’s no denying that this is a subject that really divides people, from my experience into two camps: 1) ‘wedding lists are sensible and practical, all hail the wedding list’ and 2) ‘wedding lists are greedy and presumptuous, get it out of my sight before I register them for a piece of my mind’.

Personally, I can’t fully align myself with either school of thought.  I guess I can see both sides of the argument really.  On the one hand, people will always give wedding presents.  It’s part of that beautiful thing we call social convention I guess.  And so with that comes the idea that rather than leave people to their own devices and end up with thirty sets of hand towels and no dinner plates, perhaps it’s a good idea to let guests know what things you would like or need and allow them to work it out from there.  There’s a (substantial) part of me that thinks this is perhaps a good way to do things, especially if you’re trying to be thrifty.

The other good thing about a wedding list is that it makes choosing a gift very easy for those people who, again because of either social convention or family politics (yawn), will attend your wedding despite not really knowing you all that well.  In a sense it’s fair to give these people, who probably have no incling as to what your personal tastes are, a bit of a nudge in the right direction so that everyone comes out happy and no one has to spend hours searching for the perfect gift – we’d all rather be kicking back in easy chairs with cups of tea and good books after all, right?

Having said this, the spontaneous, romantic side of me that couldn’t care less about practicalities and also shuns thrift every now and then (shame on me) *absolutely detests* the wedding list.  I think it’s presumptuous, pushy and, dare I say it, a tad unethical.  It strikes me in many ways as just plain wrong to be prescriptive about gifts – surely there’s an element of surprise inherent in the idea that simply goes out the window when the gifter is offered a list of desired objects from which to choose, the giftee knows exactly how much everything costs and where it was sourced and the whole thing is laid out in the invitation as though it were some kind of contract of sale.  It upsets me that weddings can be so businesslike – where does the romance, the suprise and the outright joy go, huh?

I guess the answer is, I don’t know where I stand on wedding lists.  In some ways I like, or at least can understand them, while in others I can think of few things worse than robbing my wedding guests of their choice as to what they buy (or make, PLEASE MAKE!) me.  Perhaps the solution is to create a list but to encourage people to deviate from it if they have a better idea in mind.  That works, to an extent, although it means being prepared to first make a list and second actually tell people about it.

Hmm, maybe it’s best to just ban gifts and encourage people to bring food and drink instead.

Image above from Flickr – Phil Gyford.

Many people truly believe in the saying that your wedding day is the happiest day of your life.  I’m not sure if I agree – my perception is that while it’s a happy day, it’s also a very busy and possibly quite stressful one.  I’m also not very keen on the idea that a single day will constitute my happiness high – surely it’s healthier to be happy every day, rather than pinning hopes to one single 24-hour period which is inevitably over before you know it.  What’s left to get excited about after that!?

I digress to a point, but the same idea applies to wedding dresses.  That’s right, that dress you wear only once.  It really surprises me that people are willing to spend thousands of pounds on their wedding dress.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m not advocating saying your ‘I do’s’ in a binbag (even one of the flashy kind with tie handles attached), but I really don’t see myself ever thinking that it’s a good idea to spend an absolute fortune on something I’ll wear for what is really a drop in the ocean as far as time is concerned.

The other thing is, most wedding dresses look identical.  I remember shopping with my then-engaged friend last year and repeatedly zoning out while she tried on variations of what was essentially the same dress.  Each tiny fluctuation in the shade of white or the length of the train flew completely over my head and I ended up huffing like a stroppy toddler until it was time to have fun trying on piles of weird and wacky bridesmaid dresses.  She eventually found ‘the one’ and of course she looked nothing short of jaw-droppingly gorgeous on the day, but I knew by that point that the wedding shop thing was just never going to be my cup of tea.

While typing this I’ve been scrawling through eBay’s selection of vintage wedding dresses.  Of course some of them are completely ridiculous and by all accounts probably belong on an 80′s ‘You’ve Been Framed’ video (of the type where the bride falls face first into the wedding cake – you know what I mean), but some of them are absolutely beautiful, and also carry gorgeous seller stories with them, often talking about the history of the dress and who has been married in it before.  There’s something really lovely, I think, about the idea of a common pool of wedding dresses which are bought, worn and sold on again with a letter about your own experience with the dress and what it meant to you to wear it to be married.  I’m a second-hand obsessive and so would say that anyway but really, it’s a lot more imaginative and a lot less costly than starting from scratch brand new and then stuffing the thing in the loft post-honeymoon.  If the dress arrives and it doesn’t fit properly you can always take it to a tailor for alterations.  Either way, you’re quids in as far as spending and creativity go.

Another option, if vintage or eBay doesn’t take your fancy, is to make your own wedding dress, or have a friend or family member who is a whizz on the sewing machine make it for you as a gift (you pay for the fabric, of course!).  I have a friend who is learning to sew bit by bit, and her ultimate dream is to make her own wedding dress on her own sewing machine.  I think this is a brilliant idea – if you’re into making your own clothes anyway then surely it’s not too much of a leap to make your own wedding dress?  And what a nice story to tell your ‘Oh I love your dress, where did you get it?’ admirers on the big day – ‘Oh this old thing?  Knocked it up myself while watching Eastenders last Thursday’.  OK so you might not be that blasé about it but you get my meaning right?

When all is said and done, the most important thing is that your wedding dress makes you feel special.  You, but the turbo-amazing version of you.  There is absolutely no reason to think that the only way you can look or feel like this is to wear a super-expensive, brand new dress.  In fact, what I like most about vintage and home-made dresses is the fact that they are different, and they allow the wearer’s personality to shine through.  They also tell a story other than the ‘I threw four grand at this – can’t you tell?’ one, which I find tedious and depressing.  Thrift never stops reminding me that it’s entirely possible to look completely amazing on very little money.  In this respect, wedding dresses are, in my book at least, no different to anything else.

Image above from Flickr – danzden.  What happened when Carrie put all her stock in the big dress and forgot about her fiancé?  Oh that’s right, he jilted her at the aisle!

I was recently invited to a friend from school’s hen party.  Or should I say hen weekend.  For that’s really what it is.  A Friday-till-Sunday all-consuming drink-fuelled, money-sucking bonanza.  I don’t want to say too much about this particular event here as I really don’t intend to upset anyone.  But the whole episode has got me thinking generally about hen parties, and how much they seem to have morphed from a simple gathering of close friends to these costly, neon-tutu-clad weekends of mayhem and hysteria.

Edinburgh seems to be quite a popular destination for hen parties – if you take a walk around town late on a Friday or Saturday evening, I guarantee you will see at least one or two.  They are usually pretty conspicuous – all you need to do is look for a big group of women, all wearing several bizarre items of clothing in common and all screeching at the tops of their voices, usually at innocent passers-by.  This makes me *cringe*.  It’s commonly pretty clear that these groups are radiating from other parts of the country, judging by the diverging accents drifting out of the various fluffy pink scrums – so not only are the people in question paying for a night out, they are also probably paying to travel to, stay in, and survive in Edinburgh (meals and drinks probably being the main expenditures) for a whole weekend.  It’s also my guess that in 9/10 cases each person pays for herself.

So just when did it become acceptable to demand that your friends fork out hundreds, yes *hundreds* of pounds for your hen party/weekend/week-long trip abroad?  Call me a killjoy but THAT AIN’T FAIR.  Of course I’m happy that my friends are getting married, and of course I want to be involved in the celebrations, but does that automatically mean I’m willing to part with an obscene amount of money?  No it doesn’t, simple answer.

And it’s not only the money.  Is it really reasonable to assume that your friends are willing to sacrifice whole weekends, or even longer periods of time to travel to another part of the country (or the world) just to celebrate your getting married?  Something weird seems to settle over a certain type of female when she becomes engaged – like the placing of a rock on her left hand is the key to unleashing the selfish ‘it’s all about me’ monster that has hitherto been lurking just beneath the surface.  And some bridesmaids take the responsibility of organising and executing a hen party as a rush of blood to the head, which gives them the authority to prescrible what happens, where it happens and how much it costs everyone.  A friend of mine is also in the midst of some testy hen weekend negotiations at the moment, with the bridesmaid (from hell, I should add) in question mandating that everyone not only pays their own way but that they also pitch in to pay for the bride!  Yes you read right.  So as if it wasn’t galling enough to pay for travel to another city, two nights’ accommodation, meals and drinks, those involved have also been burdened with paying for someone else to do just that as well!  I find that more than just slightly infuriating.  But what happens if you decide (quite rightly) to stand up in the face of this tide of emotional blackmail?  Well, as my friend has experienced, a severe guilt trip of the ‘you’re ruining the happiest time of her life’ variety, followed by a severe cooling of relations.  People can be so charming, can’t they?

Now I fully understand that to some people I probably sound like a complete spirit dampner, and for this, I do (kind of) apologise.  But in truth I’m not fundamentally anti-hen party at all.  I was bridesmaid to one of my best friends in November, and for her hen organised a brilliant (if I may say so) mad hatter’s tea party, followed by food, drinks and games back at her place.  The cost was roughly £15 per head, and the event took up a single Saturday.  It suited the then bride-to-be perfectly, and it meant that everyone she had wanted to come could be there – there were no qualms about money, and family members who without doubt would have rejected a boozy weekender were able to join in without feeling either awkward or uncomfortable.  And isn’t that the whole point of the exercise?  Spending some quality time with your closest females, chatting, laughing and generally having a great time?

What I hate is the expectation that we should all be willing to throw bags of our money and great chunks of our time away at someone else’s whim, as though we don’t have our own lives to lead and better things to spend our hard-earned cash on.  Saying no to over the top hen parties doesn’t mean you’re not happy for your friend to get married, it just means that you won’t be subjected to the kind of emotional bullying that goes on by haughty brides and bridesmaids up and down the country.  People need to realise that yes, you love and support them in their life choices but no, that doesn’t mean that you are willing to bankrupt yourself to help them celebrate those choices.

There are so many fun-filled ways to have a hen party that don’t cost the earth.  Have a sleepover and paint each other’s nails, have a movie night with your closest friends and make your own snacks, go to a show, have a barbeque, have a night out in your own city and create a kitty for the drinks.  My favourite idea (which one day perhaps I will put into practice) is to have a big game of rounders in the local park, followed by huge plates of low-cost grub and a few glasses of wine back at someone’s house or flat.  Cheap, fun and with the added bonus that everyone can go home when it’s over.

So any brides-to-be (or crazy bridesmaids for that matter), listen up: will the wedding really suffer if you can’t jet off to Dublin, or Magaluf with your girlfriends to celebrate it?  Of course it won’t.  Give your friends a break and stop being so demanding.  They will still have to pay for a wedding present (we’ll get to that later); transport to and from your venue and possibly accommodation for that matter as well.  Then there’s the small matter of an outfit.  Take this into account when planning your hen parties and try not to forget that other people have lives, and financial responsibilities as well!

Thankyou.

Image above from Flickr – Express Monorail.  I used this picture because everything that came up under a ‘hen party’ search made me feel nauseous.