Marriage is the union of two people, their families, and their cultures. Paying tribute to your cultural heritage is a way to make your wedding feel more meaningful. However, it can pose a challenge when the bride and groom come from very different ethnic backgrounds. With a little creativity and an open mind, it is possible to blend two contrasting cultures into one fabulous multi-cultural wedding.
Figuring out where to start your wedding planning can be overwhelming. Often couples having a multi-cultural wedding will decide to hire a wedding coordinator to help them seamlessly blend the bride and groom's cultures. The tricky part is to pair diverse customs without looking like you are having two separate events. In other words, the heritage of each person must be made to co-exist, not compete.
Two of the defining aspects of cultures are the food and the attire. An excellent way to present a variety of foods is with individual stations. For instance, if the bride's family is from India, and the groom's background is Scottish, they could have serving stations offering up the local delicacies of each country. This way, Tandoori chicken and haggis can both be offered side by side. (It is much better to allow guests to choose their own meal than to serve a plated dinner with strange or unappetizing food pairings.) It would also be nice to include some more typical American wedding favorites for less adventurous guests. Serving stations highlighting the best of each culture's food are a great way for the bride and groom's families to learn a little about the other one's heritage.
Clothing is one of the strongest cultural associations. Our Indian bride and Scottish groom could do something like this: for the ceremony, the groom would wear the traditional kilt in his family's tartan. His father would likely wear a kilt, as well, but certainly you wouldn't ask the bride's male relations to don such unfamiliar garb. For the ceremony, the bride could wear a classic white American bridal gown worn with the traditional wedding jewelry that is so important in Indian weddings.
When it comes time for the reception, the bride might want to change into a beautiful sari. (Also capitalizing on the hot trend of brides wearing a second dress for the reception.) The groom could stay in his kilt (most men are not interested in a second outfit!). Since the wedding is typically more about the bride than the groom, anyway, I would probably use more of the Indian inspired touches to decorate the reception venue. Tables could be draped with shimmering layers of silks embroidered with gold thread. Groupings of pillar candles with an abundance of flowers would be wonderful on the tables. For the music, play the bride and groom's favorite tunes, but sprinkle in a couple of Scottish or Indian tunes during the night.
Another great way to use cultural accents in with wedding favors and bridesmaid gifts. For instance, our Indian bride could gather a collection of little purses made from the gorgeous embroidered fabrics for which India is known. To make it personal, give each attendant a bag in her favorite color. Then in keeping with an American bridesmaid gift tradition, slip a pretty pair of pearl earrings into each girl's purse. Your bridesmaids can wear the earrings and carry the purses at your wedding, and they will love the individuality of this gift.
Strong marriages are built on compromise and acceptance of differences between the husband and wife. Your wedding is the ideal time to start building this foundation. Instead of favoring the heritage of one person over another, with a little planning, it is possible to combine the cultures of both the bride and groom into one fantastic multi-cultural wedding.
Most nonsmokers think of tobacco plants as interchangeable - if you've smoked one, you've smoked 'em all. But as anyone knows who has ever compared the taste of a premium cigar to a cheap one - or who has visited the Middle East, where an undreamt-of range of sweetly intense tobacco smells assault the tourist's nostril - nothing could be further from the truth. Tobacco plants vary as widely - and as consequentially - as any other plant. Here is a rough guide to a few of these differences - and the difference they make to smokers.
Going alphabetically, we begin with Aromatic Fire-Cured tobacco, grown in the western portions of Tennessee and Kentucky as well as in Virginia. Rich and slightly flowery, you'll find it used in snuff, cigarettes and as the less dominant partner in blends made for pipe smokers. On the other side of the world, there's a variant, another kind of fire-cured tobacco: strong-flavored Latakia, grown in Cyprus and Syria for use in Balkan and English pipe tobacco blends.
Then there's Brightleaf tobacco, which originated in North Carolina and, hence, is nicknamed "Virginia tobacco." (Well, whatever.) Developed in 1839, in response to smokers' demands for a milder tobacco than the dark fire-cured leaves commonly grown in the antebellum South, this tobacco owes its existence to a combination of industry and happenstance.
Farmers in nearby Maryland and Pennsylvania, as well as farther-away Ohio, had been trying since the early part of the century to develop a lighter leaf, trying different ways of curing the plants. Abisha Slade of North Carolina, noticing that sandy soil tended to yield weaker plants, tried the expedient of planting a gold-leaf plant in a field of seemingly-infertile sandy soil belonging to him. A clever idea, but all might still have been lost had Slade's slave, Stephen, not used charcoal to restart a curing fire that had gone out. The sudden heat turned the leaves yellow. Slade, noticing this, seized on it and made of it a method: grow plants in poor soils and then heat-cure them with charcoal (rather than fire-curing them with, well, fire).
In any case, Slade's discovery - or Stephen's discovery - had immediate economic implications. Not only did American smokers now have the less acrid tobacco they'd been looking for, but Virginia farmers had something for which they'd hardly dared hope - an economic use for the previously infertile Appalachian piedmont.
Farmers stuck with otherwise-useless lands suddenly had a cash crop - and the Piedmont counties came to dominate US tobacco production. The Civil War only increased the popularity of Brightleaf tobacco, as Confederate soldiers passing through the railway hub of Danville, VA, acquired a taste for the popular local variety, and brought that taste with the to the front.
Trading it among each other - and, during breaks in battle, with Union soldiers - these young men served as Brightleaf's unappointed press agents. The Civil War created a national market for the crop and ensured that Virginia's Caswell and Pittsylvania Counties were the only counties in the South to find themselves richer after the war than before it.
White Burley tobacco, meanwhile, furnishes a true example of evolution in action. At the tail-end of the Civil War, an Ohio farmer, George Webb, finds that a few of his seedlings look sick and whitish; in the field, they grow to normal size but remain light-colored. He put them on sale at a Cincinnati market - not as a smokable tobacco but as a novelty plant. But by the following year he'd already decided that the air-cured, mild-tasting leaf was worth a risk, and planted ten acres of seedlings from that first generation of mild white plant. With time, the new variety - White Burley, produced seemingly by chance genetic mutation and encouraged in its development by cultivation - became the primary ingredient in chewing tobacco as well as in American pipe and cigarette tobacco. Meanwhile, Red Burley, popular in the mid-nineteenth century, sank into obscurity and eventual extinction; nowadays White Burley is generally just Burley.
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