Posts Tagged ‘celtic’
Wedding Cakes
Nearly every family or social event involves the eating of food and the imbibing or drinks in the celebration. Consider Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, and weddings. In this article, I would like to talk about that centre piece of the wedding reception: the wedding cake.
The guests come to eat, drink and be merry and the bride’s parents always put a great deal of work into the preparation for the wedding reception. The wedding cake is the focal point of the top table and the whole reception in general. The wedding cake has traditional importance and it is usually considered bad luck not to have a piece of the wedding cake.
There are precise rules for the timing of the cutting of the wedding cake that have become part of tradition. For example, if the wedding reception takes place at lunch or dinner, it is traditional to cut the wedding cake just before the dessert is presented.
However, if the reception is to take place in the late afternoon or early evening, the cake is served as soon as the guests arrive. In some traditions the bride and groom cut and eat the first slice together as a symbol of their vows to love, honour and obey each other. The remainder of the cake is generally cut by one of the assistants, like the maid of honour or a family relative.
It can be quite hard to choose the wedding cake. Traditionally, people opt for a white cake with white icing for weddings, however nowadays, people are becoming more adventurous and are picking more exotic flavours and colours.
Some people choose to have a wedding cake which has different flavours on each layer. While white icing is still the overwhelming favourite, people do order other colours like pink and yellow. Chocolate and mocha are also popular. These days you can have what you like. It is your day, after all.
Everybody likes the wedding reception. It is the most well-liked part of the wedding day and everyone looks forward to seeing the cake cut and sharing it with the bride and groom.
If you are thinking about becoming a cake decorator, you have a few options to go about it. You could buy a book or a course or get a video in order to teach yourself how to decorate cakes from the simple to the ornate. You could also go to a night school class to study the art or cake decoration.
Without a doubt, the very best way to learn cake decorating is to take a class. DVD’s, videos, and books are all well and good, but you cannot converse with them or ask questions. If you attend a class for three months or more you will learn more and get a more profound understanding of the art of cake decoration. You will learn how to put real feeling into the decoration of the cake and you will be able to translate the wedding couple’s dreams into a cake that you and they can be proud of.
If you are interested in a Welsh gold wedding ring, or Wales in general, go to our web site at Welsh Products Online
Vacation Rental Homes, Are They Safe?
Many people that go on vacation have a preference to rent a home in their destination rather than staying in a hotel. Most of these people do this because it offers them the freedom to cook their own food and eat out at what time they like without missing set meals that they have previously paid for.
It can be more difficult to find such a vacation rental than just booking a hotel reservation. However, most holiday makers say that the endeavor is worthwhile. There are a few points that you should check up on if you are not to be disappointed when you get there.
It is very useful if you have friends or family living in the destination locale and if you do have this advantage, you should use it, but all is far from lost if you do not. There are often agencies for these kinds of vacation rentals as many people who live in such places rent their homes out in the peak period and they do this through those agencies.
There are also quite a few web sites specializing in home rentals for vacational purposes. Some of these Internet agencies just charge on behalf of the property owner and others can arrange swaps, which is a great, cheap way to travel the world.
The surveys that these web sites carry out are typically quite comprehensive, containing such predictable details as the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, but also such information as whether there is a phone, a car, bicycles or scooters on the property, along with distance to the shops, main road, airport, train and bus stations.
However, if you have any questions still unanswered, you are usually encouraged to ask them directly to the property owner via the agency’s web site. It is a good idea to rent a vacation home through a rental agency for safety reasons, because if a problem does occur then you have a go-between on hand. In these situations the agency would handle the entire affair, up to the point of criminal proceedings.
You may also like to ask about the age of the property, because often the day to day repairs of the place is down to you while you are there, as are breakages, unless those things are covered by the owner’s insurance policy.
You should also find out whether you are allowed to make use of the home owner’s bedding, linen, and towels etc.. Often you just consider the house and its contents as your own, unles a cupboard or door is locked and you have not been given the key.
One last piece of advice is to get suitable directions. Places that you are not familiar will look very different in the dark than they do in the daylight, particularly if the property is off the beaten track.
Therefore, if you are expecting to arrive late or if there is a possibility that you might be delayed, ask for photographs of key points taken in the twighlight. It will make certain that you get to your destination vacation home rental with no problems.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the rental of Welsh coastal cottages. If you are interested in a cottage or Wales in general, please go to our website at Welsh Products Online
Wedding Favours For Your Guests
There are many presents that can be used as wedding favours, after all the point of wedding favours is to show your guests that you are grateful for them coming to your wedding and showing their support for your wedding. Therefore, you should really try to find wedding favors, that your guests will be keen on.
Of course, the gift that most appeals to your guests, may not be one you would choose for yourself, but you are getting the wedding favours for your guests, not yourself. If you think about it, you should be able to come up with something that everyone will like and that you are proud to give. In order to help you get the job done, we will offer you a few tips below.
Love spoons are a prevalent souvenir at Welsh and other Celtic weddings. A love spoon was a wooden spoon carved by a love sick man for the woman he cherished. She would then either take or reject the love spoon, although she was not bound by the acceptance of the spoon. Miniature copies are often used as wedding favours. They can be carved with dates and names and symbols of love such as a hearts, bells, vines, key holes, anchors and knots.
Wedding favours can also be suitable to eat. There are a lot of choices available for couples who wish to give their guests some type of edible favour. You can have many items personalized these days. Some firms specialize in personalized presents, which can also be given as wedding favours. Some examples of edible, personalized wedding favours might be: chocolate bars, mints, biscuits or gourmet chocolates. The box or wrapper could bear your photo or / and your names and the date.
Miniature wedding cakes are another concept for edible wedding favours. Miniature wedding cakes have a short shelf life so they will have to carry a warning, which will probably be put on the wrapper automatically, but it is worth checking.
A half / quarter or miniature bottle of wine or other drink would also be fairly easy to organize as wine bottle labels can be bought in any home brew shop.
Picture frames are frequent wedding favors. You could give a picture frame and follow it up with a photo of the beneficiary of the frame enjoying your wedding party. This might be expensive and tricky to set up as you will have to keep records of who has been photographed and who has not. It would be terrible to miss someone out, would it not? You will probably also need a professional photographer or at least a dedicated amateur.
Wedding favours can be anything really, but I reckon that they are best if they are useful. We gave very atypical bottle-openers away at our wedding. They had a pattern of a couple getting married, our names and the date. They also had a magnet in them to collect the bottle top as it came off. I have seen dozens of our bottle-openers stuck on our friends’ fridges over the years and the wedding was three years ago.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with Welsh love spoons, or Wales in general, go to our website at Welsh Products Online
Choose Your Wedding Ring Wisely
There is a very large number of wedding rings available in the shops these days. In fact, you have the world of wedding rings to choose from. The high street shops in a large town have a very good selection, but the Internet lays the best jewellers and the best styles out for your inspection.
So, it is very important that you take your time when selecting one. Maybe the enormous assortment of wedding rings makes that more difficult not easier. Diamond wedding rings have been the most popular since ordinary working people could afford them, before that a plain band of gold had to be enough, for people who could afford that much.
Nowadays, Western people have become more adventurous and they are choosing other stones like the stunningly beautiful blue sapphire. Some even deciding not to have a stone at all, going back to tradition, so to speak. However, there are plenty of examples of not so simple bands of gold too.
There is the Irish Claddagh ring with its characteristic two hands holding a crowned heart symbolizing love, friendship and loyalty; and there is the Celtic Knot with its intricately interwoven strands twisting and turning without end, standing for eternity and eternal love despite the twists and turns and difficulties of daily life.
So, selecting a wedding ring is not just a question of picking a beautiful wedding ring, you should be picking one that says what you want it to say. You could look up on the Internet what the different metals and various stones indicate traditionally. If you cannot find a ring that says what you want, consider having one made. It is not as expensive as you might think.
Tradition is a good thing when it comes to wedding rings. After all, you want your ring to express your eternal love and devotion for the person you are giving it to and your marriage could last fifty or sixty years, especially with people living longer these days. Hopefully, you will wear this ring for the rest of your life, so select a style that seems timeless to you.
Picking a wedding ring is not as straightforward as it looks, because you are going to be wearing your ring every day for the rest of your life, so it should be something that you will not get tired of in a couple years. You should look at and try on many rings in order to get one that feels comfortable. You will want a ring that does not look out of date in ten years time. The simplest method of doing that is to go for a traditional style, because those styles have already stood the test of time.
One last piece of advice is to ask the jeweller to verify the total carat weight of the stones in the ring and the weight of each individual stone and the quality and weight of the metal (although it should be hallmarked) on paper, then if it gets lost or stolen you have something to show the insurance company.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with the Celtic knot wedding ring. If you have an interest in gold rings, please go to our website now at White Gold Claddagh Ring
The Growth of California and Gold Fever
In January 1848, James Marshall was overseeing the building of a saw mill for his employer, when he noticed an odd rock glinting in the upturned soil.
He was not sure whether it was gold or not and did not want to get people’s aspirations up. So Marshall attempted to break the yellow rock with a hammer. It did not crack, but it did dent. just like gold would. The woman who was cooking meals for the saw mill construction crew, tried another test by boiling the rock in lye.
They boiled it all day, but it did not change colour. So, they passed the rock over to the mill’s owner, Mr. John Sutter, who also conducted a few tests. Eventually, everyone agreed that this rock was indeed gold.
It seems that the Sierra Nevada Mountains held huge stores of gold, but that over tens of thousands of years, erosion had loosened up gold nuggets and the mountain streams washed them down to the base of the mountains. Sutter’s property was situated between two rivers and so was expected to generate great wealth.
Sutter had plans to build an agricultural empire on his 39,000 acres of land, so he asked his employees to keep stum about the strike. However, as is to be anticipated, word leaked out. Eventually news of the gold strike reached the small town of San Francisco.
There, a newspaper publisher shouted down the streets: “Gold from the American River!” and within three days of the news arriving, 400 of the 600 inhabitants had set out for Sutter’s land. It was a groundswell and by the end of the year, gold prospectors had traveled to California from as far away as Mexico and Chile.
When word of the gold strike got to the east coast, President Polk confirmed the finding. It was December 1848 and ‘The Gold Rush’ became a national and even a worldwide phenomenon. The gold miners of 1849 and later years became known as forty-niners.
What has to be borne in mind is though, that most people, who came from Canada, Mexico and the eastern United States came by wagon train, as there were not locomotive! This meant a arduous trek of between six and nine months
Nevertheless, at least 32,000 people actually walked to California in 1849, and about 44,000 more got there in 1850. Others, such as South Americans, faced an arduous journey by sea. They suffered storms, shipwrecks, hunger and thirst, disease, and overcrowding and after all that, some still had to face mule rides through jungles and deserts! Still, in under a year, about 40,000 people arrived in San Francisco from abroad.
The new arrivals constituted a dramatic change in California’s population, because in 1848, California had had about 100,000 residents, most of whom were Native Americans, but within two years, the state populace more than doubled but the variety of ethnicity increased tens of times.
Some people found gold and made a lot of money in the Californian riverbeds, but most people did not become rich in the Gold Rush. When gold was found, the cache was usually cleared quickly. James Marshall had little success as a miner, and he died on the breadline. John Sutter, who had once owned 39,000 acres, left California in serious debt after miners flattened his land.
In fact, it was simpler to make money selling spades and other provisions to the prospectors. Most people lost everything they had, so they stayed to farm the vast expanse called California or to set up businesses. By 1856, San Francisco had a very cosmopolitan population of over 50,000 people and California had become the most exhilarating state in the nation.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with Celtic knot rings. If you have an interest in gold rings, please go to our website now at White Gold Claddagh Ring