So our wedding preparations are trucking along slowly, but surely. We finally sat down and drew up our guest list of 20-25 people... Then at our next meeting with Fr. Joe, whom we'd been seeing fortnightly, we would have prepared a draft of the ceremony booklet. And I have begun talking to one of the two restaurants we want to have our lunch reception at here in Balmain. I guess what's next up would be the invitations, which we have already discussed what we wanted and are going to be designing it ourselves.

A detail which Lee brought up which he'd like to do for our wedding is to request an ang pau (hong bao) from our guests instead of gifts. That this would help us pay for some of the wedding expenses as well as help us begin our new life together. I thought this was a bit challenging seeing as 2/3rd of our guests aren't Chinese, so I've been trying to think of a way to execute this without offending our guests. One idea would be to mail it along with the wedding invitations, and insert a little note with the red packet explaining the cultural meaning and request of the gesture. The other would be to explain to them in person that they will be provided little red packets at the reception and what the gesture meant.

I'm rather leaning towards the first idea, but am currently in a dilemma about getting these ang pau envelopes here in Sydney. I had two packs of really pretty gold wedding ang paus back in KL, but obviously forgot to pack them! I might just need to get a girlfriend to help buy them for me, or see if I'm lucky enough to find them at Haymarket or Cabramatta.