I’ve gotten tons of feedback on my post about David not wanting a Boutonnière. Who knew? Apparently all of us are looking for those little ways where the wedding industry is asking us to spend more More MORE and we really don’t need to spend anything at all.
With all the buzz, I’ve done a little bit more research. Miss Manners, the source of all practical and sane advice, recommends a single flower at the button hole rather then “a bouquet.” Wikipedia offered up this touching fact: “It is a British practice to place, after a wedding, the flowers from a buttonhole (together perhaps with other wedding flowers), on the grave of a recently deceased member of one of the families concerned.“
Thanks to my readers, I learned that the original tradition was that the bride broke off a piece of her bouquet and tucked it into the grooms buttonhole, so the groom was wearing the brides colors (thanks Shannon and Beck). I think this is great! It’s simple and it feels far more traditional and less contrived then the boutonnière. We are planning on doing this now. It’s going to be easy for us, since in a Jewish wedding you sign the Ketubah before the ceremony, so we can do it then. If you are choosing to not see your groom before the ceremony, you could always send along a bridesmaid with a tiny sprig of your bouquet, or more adorably, a flower girl as your tiny emissary. Or heck, you could skip all that, and he could just put a jaunty flower in his buttonhole.
I really think these are far more meaningful traditions, and the fact that they cost less money is just icing on the cake (Pun intended.)
