Fabulous Fusion Weddings

Customs and Traditions

With fusion weddings, it’s hard to incorporate every single tradition of each culture. Think of what events you want when you pick and choose the traditions that mean the most to you and your partner. If you’re having two full separate ceremonies, incorporating rituals might be easier. If you’re having one joint ceremony, you’ll have to think carefully about what is most important to you. 

Just as you want to find unique traditions to showcase at your wedding, it’s also nice to find similar or overlapping traditions or rituals.

For example, the Jewish “chuppah” is a simple version of an Indian wedding’s mandap. If you’re having a Hindu / Jewish wedding, keep the mandap simple to speak to both cultures...

“Hava Nagila” is a fun traditional Jewish song where the bride and groom are lifted in chairs in celebration. Indians tend to do the same thing (or just lift the bride and groom during the reception). Celebrating those traditions automatically speaks to both traditions and is lots of fun too! 

“For the ceremony, the priest, groom, bride and bride's parents sit beneath a mandap, a canopy similar to a Jewish chuppah. The ceremony starts off with the kanya daan, in which the bride's parents give her away. Then the couple join hands and circle around a small, enclosed fire (the agni) in a ritual called the mangal phera.”

Arrive in Style

Whether you're planning a fusion wedding or not, we just LOVE this gorgeous Indian Ambassador car from Kushi cars!

Celebrate with a feast

One of the greatest parts of a fusion wedding is celebrating each culture and showing your roots to your new families. 

Food plays a large part in this, it's often the most anticipated part of any wedding, and now you have two cultures to celebrate.

We welcome the idea of bringing in external caterers if you wish to provide traditional cusine, (just ask us about the terms of doing so.) Alternatively our Chefs to create a bespoke menu; and if you’re not wanting to go down the route of “fusion” food, pick and choose some of your favorite dishes instead.

Dance, Dance, Dance!

Almost every culture has a wedding tradition linked to a dance of some kind. To help make your guests feel really involved, you could include them in a group dance performance (a bollywood dance class mid-meal always proves to be a hit!)

Beautiful Blooms

Weddings across cultures all over the world use flowers and they are a perfect way to showcase both cultures with colour and origin.

Be our guest

Guests at a fusion weddings love being a part of the action. Often they are curious and excited to join the fun. Its great if you can help them to understand both cultures and in let them in on what to wear, what to expect, and any other cultural info that could be helpful for them to understand what’s going on.

Here's a few ideas to help guests immerse themselves in your culture...

• Your wedding website (or wedsite!) is the perfect area to put in as much information as you wish for all of your guests, and here at Elmore we help you to set up your very own wedding webpage (!) which can  be personalised with the timings for the day, traditions and local accommodation details too. 
• On the day, orders of service are a great place to help explain the wedding ceremony and other religious ceremonies and traditions that may follow.  It's also nice to include a little history or blurb about why each ritual/ ceremony is important and what it represents.
• Gift bags are a nice way to give a little something to each guest to help them get involved. A favourite hometown snack or a piece of jewelry such as an Indian bangle  are nice additions.

We hope this has given you an insight into how much fun fusion weddings are, and we can't wait to see more of these at Elmore this year!

If you're after some more fusion wedding inspo, take a look at this lovely anglo-Indian real wedding at the Court...

xx