Wedding traditions, part 3

Yesterday I promised you that I would be touching today upon the other and most noticeable Japanese element in our wedding: the sake ritual.

The sake ritual is one of the oldest elements of the Japanese wedding ceremony, dating back to a time when sharing a sip of sake was as formal a bond as a Victorian handshake. The ritual as it is practiced today is known colloquially as the san san ku do: three [san] sets of three sips, for a total of nine times [ku do]. Starting with the smallest of three nested cups, the groom drinks a small amount of sake in three sips. The cup is then refilled and passed to the bride, who does the same. They move on to the middle cup, then to the largest. At the conclusion of the ceremony, both families drink together to signify the unification not only of the bride and groom, but of their families and traditions as well.

The sake set that is used for the ceremony, as you can tell from this description, is a very specific type. I scoured the web (pre-Google this took a bit more effort than it would today) and finally found a store in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo that had such a thing. In fact, they had two - one in red lacquer and one in black. The one we chose (lucky red, of course!), was etched with images of pine, bamboo, and plum.

At the very end of our western wedding ceremony, we had my little sister (then 10 years old), our sake maiden, pour for us. As she poured, the officiant explained the meaning of the symbols on the sake set: pine for longevity and endurance; bamboo for constancy; plum for hope. Then we walked out to our parents, poured for them, and they drank together to symbolize the joining of the families.

Afterwards, one of DH's grandmothers came up to us, beaming, and said that when she was young, she herself had served as a sake maiden at a wedding ceremony. She hadn't understood what it was all about, and had wondered many a time, but had never known for sure - until this very day.

I beamed back, too thrilled to speak.

Wedding traditions, part 2

Our wedding celebration included a number of elements from DH's Japanese heritage as well. Our invitations had a cherry blossom motif, and we used folding fans to decorate the pews of the chapel. (Fans are symbols of the wish for future happiness and prosperity at weddings: just as the ribs of an open fan stretch out in many directions, so the couple's future unfolds before them.)

But there were two traditions that really took center stage. One was the folding of origami cranes. (The other I'll cover tomorrow.)

In Japanese-American families, it is customary to fashion lucky paper cranes for weddings. This may be due not only to the crane's association with longevity, happiness, and fidelity, but also to the belief that folding 1000 cranes will grant a wish. To make 1001 of these origami birds signifies a wish for luck "a thousand times, and then some."

Folding an individual origami crane goes pretty quickly, as you can see in this animated crane folding tutorial. Folding 1001 cranes, however, is a bit more daunting. Fortunately our mothers agreed to pitch in on the task. So we purchased packet upon packet of gold origami paper, and reconciled ourselves to devoting all of our downtime to crane making!

When the cranes were ready, we strung garlands of them from a large hoop (like the garlands of flowers and ribbons at the top of a may pole). We placed a single crane at each place setting at the reception, as an accompaniment to the chocolates we offered as favors. And even after all this, we ended up with hundreds of cranes in reserve.

Over the years, I've been tucking our wedding cranes into festive packages, and have given several batches to friends to share at their own weddings. We double the good wishes by sharing them :)

Wedding traditions, part 1

Tradition has it that in colonial America, young women made a dozen quilt tops before they married. When they became engaged, friends and neighbors would gather to help complete the twelve tops and begin on the lucky thirteenth - the coverlet for the new bride and groom. This special quilt often included blocks with names of friends and relatives embroidered or signed in ink.

You've heard me blog about my friend's wedding, where we embroidered signatures on blocks for a quilt. At my own wedding, we provided pens and squares of white fabric for people to sign at the wedding reception itself.

Curious how well it worked? One of the grandmothers (a quilter herself) took it as her own personal mission to make sure that everyone came over and signed their squares, so we ended up with a pretty complete set! And only two people, who shall remain nameless (although my mother used to be married to one of them, ahem) managed to sign on the wrong side of the fabric.

Doing a wedding quilt instead of a guestbook was one of the ways we made the wedding more personal and expressive of us. (Branches of my family have been in this country since pre-revolutionary times, so in a way, this tradition and the choice of the historic site [shown in the Christopher Gurshin painting below] were nods to my heritage, as well as to my interests.)



I'm pretty tired tonight, so I think I'll tell you about the traditions we chose to follow from DH's heritage in tomorrow's post...

Fierce white tiger

It's been 2 1/2 years since Finny was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and 6 months since he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

And yet, the cat himself is currently purring away on my lap, 3 lbs lighter and quite a few whiskers short (side effect of the radiation on his thyroid gland), but otherwise the apparent picture of health, especially for a nearly 16 year old kitty.

Worry and fear are supposed to compromise the immune system, right? So does the fact that he doesn't know (and can't ever comprehend) that he is "supposed" to be sick help keep him from manifesting symptoms?

Or is the old macho wildcat lineage rearing its head in my gentle little housecat?

The thrill of victory and the agony of the feet

DH and I have gotten into this friendly competition over what we can do on the treadmill. He automatically gets a better workout when we do the same thing because he's bigger; however, I have a very important advantage, and that is that my knees can take walking on an incline. So I can ultimately do as much as he can in the same amount of time (although I'm having to do it all uphill).

We've been one-upping each other every day, just to keep it a little more challenging. This game was all well and good until I made the decision to do about 150% of the previous day's workout. I had a reason for it that didn't pertain to our game, but I forgot to mention it to him.

When he saw the number I put up, he was very unhappy indeed. He retreated to the basement (where the treadmill is housed), and I came upstairs to check my mail.

Slightly more than an hour later, he came back upstairs and I checked with him to see how it had gone. He broke into a big grin, and announced that, once again, he had one-upped me.

RATS! Now I have to do more (not looking forward to that on today's blisters) or be the wimp who throws in the towel. Why, oh why, did I not announce I was calling the game off - back when I was still ahead! ;)