The Relationship Gift Pack

Well sadly, bride shaped stress balls don’t come at reasonable prices unless you order well into the thousands but fortunately, I was able to compromise. And luckily for me, The Boy is uber patient and persistent.

As mentioned previously, seemingly at the last minute, I decided that I wanted to get creative about the bonbonniere. I didn’t want one simple token of friendship or appreciation or whatever is supposed to be for precisely. I wanted multiple tokens. Only together. Like in a pack. I wanted to base the favour around the rhyme “for the spark in your life and the stress through the years, for the sweetness you deserve and the music to your ears” and I wanted four individual items to represent each part of the short poem. Now it didn’t all work out exactly as I had first hoped but on the whole I thought it was pretty cool.

For the spark in your life was a small hand-printed box of matches. Both simple and plain, the small boxes had a cream cover and some text printed on one side. The box read "marriage: wedlock, to tie the knot, the union of a man and a woman as husband and wife, the perfect match". Kinda kitsch I guess but I have to say that I much preferred the symbolism of having a spark between you as opposed to the pea and pear sets of salt and pepper shakers. You may well be two peas in a pod or the perfect pear pair but if I really think about what I’d want to take home from a wedding, some weird looking salt and pepper shakers are not it. I figured that at least the matches were a little more unusual. Whats more, if you felt compelled to keep them until you had made use of them, you could just light all the matches and then feel no compunction at all about throwing the box in the bin. Easy. If you did want to keep them however, we also had our names and the date printed on the box as well. Awww…

The stress through the years I felt would best be represented by a bride shaped stress ball. Not only for the fact that The Boy planned our wedding and it seemed quite fitting for us as a couple but the novelty value was there too. Despite the number of different websites we went to however we couldn’t seem to find a place that would sell us a small amount for anything less than a small fortune. We eventually had to bite the bullet and go for something else which is why we ended up with a plain white stress ball instead. We did get it printed however with our initials and the particularly apt Shakespeare quote “the course of true love never did run smooth…”. Because apparently getting a font that we were both happy with not as easy as we first had anticipated. Ridiculous, I know because who else actually cares, right? And yet…

For the sweetness you deserve, the idea came to me (read I shamelessly pinched) from a wedding I had seen set up at a restaurant. The couple had chosen to give all their guests rocky road wrapped up with a tag reading “each of us come across some rocky roads in life – hope yours are as sweet as this”. I though this was a cool idea so we went on a hunt for rocky road. We looked at the Darrel Lea option which was ok however it didn’t come in small pieces so it was a little more involved to get it to the individual portion stage. We looked at Haigh’s as well which would have tasted fantastic but costwise would have put us further behind bad than we were already so then we found Harrys. These guys were an internet based company and luckily for us were having a birthday sale. Mmm, dark chocolate…

The music to your ears was perhaps a bit of an excuse to have something we found upon our searches across the internet. Because music is quite important to us and The Boy is himself a guitarist, we really wanted to give our guests a customised guitar pick. It is the tackiest thing out being white celluloid with a big red love heart on the front and white writing inside that says “I pick U”. Then, to add insult to injury, we will stick the pick on a business card shaped piece of cardboard on which we are printing a circle and the text “our love is like a circle and never ends”. It will be stuck on just so to appear as though it is a whopping great big diamond on an engagement ring and we think its was kind of funny. I’m, pretty sure our guests will realise that we are not really that sickeningly sweet on each other…

The final part of our efforts was a box in which to put everything. The non-existent budget didn’t quite cover a box with a bas and a lid but we did manage to find a floristry wholesaler who was let to believe that we were a florist and sold us those little corrugated cardboard box things in which they stick flower arrangements. We now have a whole stack of them. We figure that with a little scrunched up paper, and a name tag on each one it won’t look like we slapped it all together at the last minute. Or at least that our guests will be too polite to say anything.