'Ka ni Kim

In the year leading up to the wedding, I consumed a mountain of wedding-related content – blogs, videos, listicles, you name it. And the popular opinion seemed to be that giveaways were a waste of money and time.

I got where people were coming from. Weddings are expensive, and you’re already buying your guests dinner and footing the bill for the whole party. Plus, some giveaways just get left behind because no one is interested in taking them home. We had talked about the fact that we were going to have a photo booth during the reception, and that was a kind of gift that people could (and would want to) take home.

But as I often do, I wanted to be extra. I scoured Pinterest and Instagram and Tiktok for ideas, and still got a lot of “wedding favors I hated” and “giveaways you shouldn’t bother with” and “reasons to skip the wedding favors” content. Eventually, I landed on lottery tickets wrapped in pretty paper with fancy script reading “lucky in love”. I thought it was a cute idea, and it was a lot more budget-friendly than some of the extra extra suggestions I saw.

As it turned out, the lotto scratchers were a hit! They gave our guests something to do while waiting for everyone to get settled in for the reception, and a few people won some money. We paired them with little tubes of bubbles that my mom and I had picked up while shopping for small things for the wedding. Throughout the reception, we spotted a lot of friends and family blowing bubbles – and, of course, poking at them until they pop.

We had the coordinators distribute the favors as people registered after the ceremony. The lotto scratchers and bubbles were stuffed into tiny envelopes. EJ designed stickers to seal them off. A few months before, we had commissioned an artist to draw us and the birds in cartoon form, so he used those “portraits” and made the background match our motif.

My brother helped us stuff and seal the envelopes. I paid for his services with bubble tea.

We ended up with a few extras and handed them out to the staff at the venue. We also gave some to the on-the-day coordination team as a small “Thank you” for following us around the entire day and making sure everything ran smoothly.

These weren’t the fanciest or most expensive wedding favors, but they were a lot of fun – and they definitely weren’t dust-collecting figurines or flimsy key chains with our names and faces plastered on them. Thanks for the warning, Pinterest!