Wedding favors come in every color, style, size, design and price. There is a huge assortment of common wedding favors, such as personalized napkins, wrapped white candy, personalized matchbooks or matchboxes, coasters, champagne flutes, wine glasses, and mugs – you name it!
However, it might be interesting to take a look at some of the things people gave as wedding favors in the past. We can get ideas and gain perspective on what you really want to say with your wedding favors by making an objective analysis of what was done by previous generations.
Often the choice of wedding favors had almost everything to do with status. If you were rich, you were able to flaunt your prosperity by giving expensive gifts to your guests, pure and simple. These wedding favors usually were things that others could not get so easily. A privileged European nobleman and his new bride might give relatives and fellow courtiers beautifully carved small porcelain boxes that in themselves cost quite a lot of money, and then fill them with exotic, equally expensive chocolate.
Status was very important as far as wedding favors, but so was symbolism. Throughout the centuries humans have always tended to be superstitious. Bad spirits always seemed to be lurking, ready to cast an evil eye or curse the happiness of a couple. To ward off these evil incarnations newly married couples would sometimes give things such as small silver bells.
The ringing of these small bells caused spirits to run away. These were apparently popular in Ireland for a time. In Victorian times, British couples gave love knots as wedding favors. These knots were meant to strengthen and ensure a strong love bond between the newlyweds. Ribbons and lace were often used to construct these love knots.
Newly wedded couples are and were basically interested in the same things: to be happily married, to have loved, to be fertile, to be lucky and to make lots of money. Nothing much has changed through the ages! For symbols of fertility, eggs have always been big: fertilized eggs, colored eggs, eggs from exotic birds, eggs of different sizes, chocolate eggs, ornaments made out of eggs with jewels, jewels made into the shape of eggs… Well, you get the picture.
Other symbols of fertility were dolls. Small dolls, larger dolls with moveable parts, exquisitely carved dolls with beautiful faces, these and other kinds of dolls represented the many children that would come as a result of the marriage union.
Plants and sprigs of herbs have also been popular.
Foods, representing the facets of marriage, such as sweetness and bitterness combined, have also been popular. Nuts were dipped in honey or chocolate, for example.
As immigrant families arrived in new lands, they most often kept the traditions of their homelands for comfort and to maintain their culture. They tended to give traditional wedding favors that were common in their home countries, but even these traditional wedding favors were commonly symbols of luck, fertility, love, happiness and wealth.
