The Wedding Series: Part 2/2 - The Mehndi, Wedding and Home Shenanigans | Zafira

Hello!

Sometime in July, I did the first part of this series and here I present to you the last. I spoke a little more about traditional Bengali weddings and how the whole process works so I won't go into too much detail here. To conclude what I said in the last post, a typical Bengali wedding has the Cinifan (engagement), the Mehndi (wedding pre-party), the actual wedding and sometimes people like to take it that one step extra and throw a Walima (an after party). It's chaotic and crazy but I love weddings. In this post, I'll show you some of the pictures of the Mehndi, the wedding and a few little bits we did with the new bride after she was welcomed into her new home. I'll explain what is going on for every picture so don't worry if you don't understand. Enjoy!

T H E  M E H N D I

At a Mehndi, everyone basically takes pictures with friends, family and the groom or bride. 

We boogie.

Get our henna done.

And everyone joins in, including the little ones.

We wear traditional clothing and get dressed up, not overly dressed though, we like to save that for the wedding.

There's always something yummy to eat too like these fruit thaals and those amazing desserts.

Everything is always made to look super duper pretty.

Here's a fun fact. all the little flowers that you see hanging and the ones on the wall are ALL handmade and we hung the curtain bits all by ourselves too. We're pretty handy when it comes to this sort of thing. 

Here's one of my uncle dressed in traditional clothing infront of all the food that's been made for him. At the Mehndi, everyone comes and takes a seat next to him, takes a couple of pics and feeds him something.

T H E  W E D D I N G

For the wedding we changed the setup a little bit and added some gold chiffon. The bride comes home with the groom at the end of the wedding and they sit here and drink milk and do some other traditional stuff. 

We all get very dressed up including the groom.

All the neighbours were out watching us leave the house to the wedding venue and it was just too adorable not to capture this moment.

This is such a good idea for a guestbook! You write your little message to newly weds on the heart and slot it into the frame.

Snap snap.

This is when the bride walked onto the stage to her husband.

Both the groom side and bride side make a necklace of flowers for the couple and these are exchanged on the wedding day. 

 This is the best bit. There was so much cake leftover.

Aaand this is the bedroom that we decorated for them. 

H O M E  S H E N A N I G A N S

The next morning or what usually turns out to be afternoon, the new bride will make breakfast for everyone in the house. The breakfast food is given by the bride's family.

The bride then has to cut a fish to cook into a curry. 

She grinds all the spices.

After all that she gives everyone a snack and this includes a banana and popcorn most of the time. We also played a few games with her but I can't show you those pictures since all of them have my family in them and I respect their privacy.

I'd like to say a huge congratulations to the newly weds and I wish you the best in life. I can't wait to see the whole family together again for something just as special as this ;)

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