Jewish/Chinese Wedding

[pikachiu132]

Hello.

I wanted to get some ideas on how to incorporate my Chinese traditions with my fiance's jewish traditions.

We will be doing the Door Games (Chinese), Jewish Ceremony outdoors, Tea Ceremony (Chinese) with Ketubah signing, and any other Jewish traditions commonly done.

However, I want to get some ideas for how to further incorporate the two cultures.

Food: Will not be having a traditional chinese banquet, but any ideas to include both types of food into one? His family is not strict kosher, but will not eat pork and milk/meat together.

[Cynthia C.M.]

I'm of Chinese descent and my husband is Jewish.  We had a non-religious/civil ceremony outdoors and a "western"/WASPy reception.  I'm not big on door games (my circle tends to go really overboard/fratboyish and at 30, I felt I was too old for that kind of thing.  Besides, none of his friends are even vaguely familiar with the tradition, and probably won't feel comfortable, say, passing licorice to the next guy without using their hands (could land on YouTube, after all).  Just looking at it from the guys' perspective ) but we broke the glass (or rather, he did) at the end of the ceremony (I highly recommend a light bulb.  It's the easiest to break), had a tea ceremony, chala cutting, table toasts (bride and groom walk around the reception hall to toast with the guests) and of course, the hora!  I changed once, as well, but didn't wear a qipao or kwa.  Instead, I wore a dress that was a "change" dress that my mom wore at her reception.  It's the only true vintage piece I own.

Foodwise:  Two ideas...

First:  a dim sum cocktail hour, followed by a kosher-friendly dinner (question:  are you having a wedding cake?  Wouldn't wedding cake have dairy?  Will you have to have a fish and vegetarian dinner?)

Second:  Mix it up! Have some courses that are traditionally Jewish and others, Chinese (a good thing to serve for the meat eaters is Chinese style beef tenderloin (jung sik gnow lau)).

Question:  Are you having wedding cake?  Will it be a problem if there's dairy in the cake?

[pikachiu132]

That's a good point about the wedding cake! I will ask.
But he said dairy+meat is okay only after an acceptable period of time. So long as we don't do like a cream sauce on the meat or something.

From my understanding half his family doesn't care, and some guest do. His mom is the biggest advocate of this.

I like the idea of the dim sum hors d'oeuvres.
The biggest challenge is to a) find a venue that will accept caterers b)decide if we even want caterers or find a good venue with a nice in house menu

[dpqmw80]

Congratulation for our wedding.I don,t know  much about chinese and jewish tradition but i think you can have mix traditionally Jewish and Chinese food  with some cocktail and desert.