OMG that is awesome. I would love to see a cookie table. Army wives historically have cookie exchanges within their "coffee groups" and it is so much fun to taste everyones "best" recipes. Maybe I should email D and tell her to keep an eye out for boys from Pennsylvania.

I LOVE the whole cookie table idea - especially if the bride gets a cookbook with all the recipes.

Note to self....

Have a cookie table at the next spawnling to get married reception.

LOVE the idea!

I don't want them at mine, I'd rather spend money on good food and booze for my guests, maybe an environmentally friendly way to travel as a group (boat, horse drawn sleds/carriages, etc.) or for centerpieces people could take. I am on a planning committee for an annual event and we buy flowers from a student group on campus that grows them as a fund raiser so we are supporting the local students and allowing guests who choose to care for a plant that could potentially live for a very long time. I snagged a pansy one last year for a dear Theta friend. People really liked the flowers and it was one less thing to clean up since they took them away.

I'm having favors at my wedding this May. I wasn't going to at first but my mom and wedding planner convinced me and I had it in my budget. I believe it is a regional tradition because it's popular in some Southern towns and not others. I am doing MS Cheese Straws (made in MS) in little bags. They are really yummy too!
http://www.mscheesestraws.com/cheese...FTOKEN=7259962

OMG I forgot to mention my cookie table!! I can't wait for the cookies, but unfortunately, ours will be purchased from a bakery. My grandma was the one to make all of the cookies and she is in a nursing home. The coordinator at our venue told us a story about how when she first started working there 20 years ago, she had never heard of a cookie table. They had all of these boxes of cookies under a table to put out after dinner. She started putting them out one box at a time, rather than spreading out the various types of cookies, and she was nearly attacked by little old ladies wondering why she didn't think there cookies weren't "good enough." She said she learned to take out a few cookies from each box! LOL

Cookie table evangelism is go!

I could live on cheese straws. Yum.

We were married in Las Vegas and had decks of cards done with our names and wedding date on them. They were done in our wedding colors and were a huge hit

I've never heard of that. What's the tradition?

As described above:

Cookie tables are amazing! We had everyone making cookies for ours...family, friends, friends of friends. My mom and I had them dropped off or we picked up all the cookies and put them on trays the morning we had to take everything to the reception hall. We had 22 trays of cookies which has AT LEAST 100 cookies on each tray. Plus we had cookies left over! I think we had at least 100 dozen cookies made. Here is a picture of what our cookie table looked like: http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a313/andreadg9/Our%20Wedding%20-%20August%202007/andrea0033.jpg

Maybe they didn't want you dreaming about who you were going to marry when you were only 4? Maybe my family made up that story totally so we didn't break our teeth on them! Maybe your family realized that making "getting married" the be all end all goal of your life was silly? Or, maybe it's just a Sicilian thing? I don't know! My family could've duped me for all I know! LOL

ETA: They also told us we were supposed to put the cake under our pillow to dream about who we would marry. I always ate mine though. Maybe that's why I'm divorced??? I screwed up!

Although my family came to Detroit from PA (not quite Pittsburgh... Uniontown), the cookie table thing didn't follow. There was always a dessert table and when we were younger, the desserts were homemade by the elder generation of women.. cannoli, pizelle, pinolata, etc. I was never big into the Italian desserts though so I stuck with cake. As we got older, the dessert table ended up catered because that generation was too old to do it and everybody else was too busy.

Now I want cookies and mac and cheese! Will someone just post pictures of yummy fruit! I'm trying to lose weight here! :)

That cookie table idea is cool. I'll have to pass it on to the next person I know who is getting married.

We did fortune cookies with fortunes we had personalized. They were REALLY cheap (we ordered 1000 cookies). We put them in Chinese take-out boxes with our picture on them and had 3 cookies per box. They went over really well, and when everyone was REALLY drunk later that night, apparently they feasted on fortune cookies. My mom decided she needed to make origami cranes to go on the boxes since it meant good luck, so she spent weeks making them. They looked awesome when displayed. I need to find a picture.

I'm thinking the idea of a cookie table would be neat for a shower - get the cookies and the recipes . . . .

I have been told that my marriage didn't work because I didn't have a cookie table! My Southern mother couldn't handle the concept at the time. :rolleyes: She is now 100% sold on them!

I'll admit, though, the last local wedding I went used purple and black as their colors (Scottish wedding, the kilts & sashes were in the clan colors). Seeing black and purple filling in a mini-ladylock didn't look very attractive. I found the whole Susanna Martinsen article, quoted here on Greek Chat:

The Legend of the Cookie Table

"An excerpt from "The Cookie Table: A Pittsburgh Tradition"

by Suzanne Martinson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Food Editor

You can have a designer wedding gown and tuxedo or hand-me-downs. You can have an "A-copy" guest list or just the closest of kissing kin. You can receive your guests at the fanciest restaurant or at a potluck at the firehall. But you aren't truly a Pittsburgher unless you have The Cookie Table.
When we first moved here and a bride-to-be mentioned The Cookie Table, I was puzzled. "What do you need cookies for?" I asked. "At a wedding, you eat cake."

Little did I know. The Cookie Table is as much a part of Pittsburgh as the Pirates and the Steelers and the Penguins. We may bleed black and gold, but at any event worth writing home about, we have cookies.
And most of these cookies are homemade by the mother of the bride, sisters, aunts, cousins and grandmothers. Sometimes both sides of the extended family get involved. Friends are also called into the fray. Happy to do it, in fact. The Cookie Table is, indeed, the gift of love.

Nobody knows the exact origin of the tradition, which has been exported to other parts of Pennsylvania, other states, too. It may be Italian or Slovak or Polish or Croatian or Greek. The Scandinavians may get involved, and the Indians, too. The Germans do cookies, and so do the Irish. If we've left anybody out (like the English), add them to the cookie equation. There may be no greater tribute to cross-cultural friends and marriages than The Cookie Table. It's what makes America great; a medley of cultures taking the best from each. The best, in this case, being favorite family cookie recipes. When we researched the topic for the premier edition of the Food Section in 1996, we talked with more than 150 people. The cookies that emerged most often as the "must haves" on the table were: Pizzelles; Biscotti; Italian Anise Drops; Baklava; Cherry Cheesecakes; Thumbprints; Pecan Tassies; Apricot, Poppyseed, and Nut Rolls. And two indicators that Americans never stop innovating: Buckeyes and Hershey Kiss Cookies...

Remember, in Pittsburgh, people don't wonder, "How was the wedding?" They ask, "Were the cookies good?"

Can I come to your wedding? I gave tins of MS Cheese Straws to my co-workers for Christmas this year. YUM! I could eat them for breakfast.

Just wondering if anyone read Miss Manners yesterday? (An alternate site for the column.)

The second letter was about wedding favors.

Excellent column on the whole "favors" issue. Seriously, when did we turn weddings into children's birthday parties?? I love Miss Manners.

This is such a good point - and I really like what she said about making a donation instead: "Yeah, we thought about giving you a gift and then decided not to." That's almost worse! I think we may have a basket of rock candy or cookies or something up front, little bags of chocolate maybe, something edible and not an expensive gift. The gifts should go to the wedding party that helped organize the day to show your appreciation, you shouldn't have to show appreciation to people that just show up for the party. Now there's going to be even more money for food/booze/honeymoon! :D Thanks Miss Manners!

Thanks mods for cleaning up this thread!!

Wedding favors - what you want to buy
 

As far as wedding favors go, I like to receive personalized stuff. Anything personalized is good. I think personalized photo guest books are really good because you don't have to label them yourself. You can just tuck it away, organized and such. Then when you want to find it the label is already personalized on the cover. Easy.

Hammilton

My fiance's father has volunteered to make wine splits with custom labels for our wedding guests to take home (he makes his own wine).

Apparently there is a winery here where they do this. At my Godson's wedding, we each received a bottle of wine with a label that had a picture of the bride and groom. The bridal party had gone to the winery and were involved in the bottling/labeling so it was like a little mini-party and time for the bridal party to get to know each other too. Very cool idea.

The other wedding I went to this summer gave wine stoppers. Also a great favor. I'd been wanting one and was excited to get it!

Yes, there are a few wineries in the Seattle area that will do it, but we love that the wine is actually going to be from "the family wine estate" (haha).

Oh definitely! It makes it even more special when it's from the family! My Italian grandfather made each of his grandchildren a huge.. I don't know what you call them, they were bottles as big as a small child, probably 4 feet tall.. of wine for our weddings. He made them when we were born. It was very special to have that, especially since he passed away when I was 14 and couldn't be there for my special day. He only saw a few of us actually get married, but his wine was at all of our weddings.

That is so sweet! You are very lucky he thought ahead like that.

We got luggage tags without the bride and groom's name this summer. (There was a travel theme.) I love useful favors.

We once got luggage tags being used as a form of place cards. They read the bride & groom's names with the date, then the name of person to sit there. I thought it was very colorful and clever!

Wow, that was touching.

I don't know about the whole confetti thing. Maybe that's a Sicilian tradition but when I was in Italy last summer (Milan, so northern Italy), they had confetti at a baby dedication, and everyone ate the confetti. Though again, I'm sure the tradition varies regionally.

Yeah, I know it's an older post, but since it got spam-bumped, I ask anyway: Why would anyone want luggage tags with someone else's name on them? Mine would head straight for the trash.

The only truly useful wedding favors I've ever come across have been matchbooks.

I don't know why people emboss/engrave half the favors they do, to be honest. That's why I was glad they were not. I throw all of that stuff out too, unless it is a package for food or drink. Call me not sentimental.

The bride and groom's names are on the one side of the little white card for personalization, you then fill out the other side when you go to use it. The ones I got looked like Christmas ornaments - obviously, a Christmas wedding.

What are our current and recent GC brides using for wedding favors? We'll will be doing a donation to charity (specific charity is still TBD, lol)

We had 2 favors:

1- I'm Canadian (I'll be in an American Citizen in 2 weeks!) and there's this chocolate shop back in my hometown that I just love! So they made big maple leaves out of chocolate for us.

2- I saw in a bridal magazine an idea about making a music CD out of everyone's first dances. We only had about 80 guests at our wedding, so this was doable (where as if you had like 200+, it may not necessarily be). We contacted all the married couples that were invited to the wedding and asked them what their first dance song was. We then created the CD and put our first dance song, our parents's songs, and then all the others of those attending the wedding. Everyone loved it! We even had our DJ play the first dance song for each of our parents during the reception as well for everyone to dance to.

We did little bottles of alcohol. We used an eastern European plum brandy (which tastes like burning) as a nod to my hubs' heritage. We found cute bottles and we filled, corked and labeled them ourselves.

We're doing 2 as well. We're making a donation to St. Jude's hospital.

I'm Slovenian, so part of the tradition is that my side of the family prepares a lot of traditional sweets (exactly like a cookie table). However, with appetizers during cocktail hour, four courses, cake, and late night snacks, the food often goes uneaten.

So, we're using a box for a place setting.

http://www.marthastewartweddings.com...03_fvrbx_l.jpg


In the box is a little note thanking the guests for coming and explaining the tradition. We're going to have the guests fill the box with whatever treats they like so they can enjoy them the next day, or later that night.

Slivovitz!!! As my uncle always says, you can run a car off of it! It does make for fun parties though. :D