Serve a modified Mediterranean diet at your next toga party, wedding, or ancient-themed grand opening. This works well for buffet food served at grand openings or exhibits at galleries and museums. Combine themed art and food with costumed guests or entertainers.
Biblical-style, ancient-themed vegan weddings, parties, and grand openings are back. They can be done with sesame paste (tahini) and garbanzo/chick pea dips, sliced vegetables, and fruit juice punch on a neighborhood budget.
Popular with weddings are Biblical themes in ancient-style costumes and celebration of life events honoring an employee, club member, friend, or relative. The parties or events are costume dramas.
They’re done in ancient Biblical, Roman or Greek toga parties featuring raw, vegan, or healthier foods and fruit juices. Or the celebrations might emphasize recreating ancient, ethnic, Biblical, new thought, or fantasy themes, such as those based on king-and-queen coronation ceremonies.
Vegan costume drama parties with ancient themes can be budgeted to take place at home or in a museum, art gallery, or convention center. Recipes used might come right out of the Bible, such as the recipe for bread made of meal or flour made from lentils and other legumes and whole grains.
Ancient-themed weddings, including catering for them, costuming, staging, and performing, are booming. The cost-effective weddings range from virtual online affairs to mini-costume dramas on stage. Some of these ancient-themed weddings recreate and incorporate king and queen coronation ceremonies into marriage rites. Theme weddings can cost little to start up and even can be run at home.
You handle everything from setting the stage at ordering the costumes to catering to food and booking the entertainment. Costs can vary from a couple of hundred dollars to tens of thousands.The lowest budget is about $200 for a home-based toga party, standard SPQR Senate and the Roman people flag, and a dinner banquet created around a backyard or community center pool.
Live music or even recorded throngs may be played as video cameras roll for viewing by future generations. Ethnic and ancient music create ambiance. You can join Nova Roma and consult them about where to buy or rent props if you’re interested in recreating an ancient Roman-style wedding. Or work up your own Biblical-themed wedding based on your cultural and religious ties.
According to its site, Nova Roma is an international organization dedicated to the study and restoration of ancient Roman culture. From its founding to 330 CE, when it ceased to be the center of Imperial authority, Rome laid the foundation for our modern Western civilization. Founded 2,750 years after the Eternal City itself, Nova Roma seeks to bring back those golden times, not through the sword and the legions, however, but through the spread of knowledge and through our own virtuous example.
Neighborhood-budget ancient-themed weddings may be recreated around the pool, with recordings of ancient music. You might have a buffet of fish pies, meat, fowl, salads, honey cakes, grapes, and pomegranate juice. Or serve retsina wine.
Costs can vary from home-based backyard or poolside toga events costing three figures serving fruit, parsley-wheat-tomato salad, and juices all the way up to $10,000-$30,000 for the coronation of the bride and groom in either an ancient Roman wedding rite or as pharaoh and queen of ancient Egypt. For a low-cost wedding, serve desserts, snacks, and fruit juice.
The ambiance comes from the music and any volunteer performers, such as ancient music performers recruited from a variety of Renaissance faires, students, and folk dancers from international folk dance clubs you find practicing on a regular basis at community centers or public parks.
Watch a performance to make sure they are well-rehearsed. One possibility is a group of tribal dancers or a male and female belly dance team. Growing in popularity is the biblical wedding, in ancient key break style key brainiac Hebrew which Hebrew style, emulating the marriage of King Solomon to the Egyptian princess, for interfaith weddings.
Biblical Recreations and Costume Drama Weddings Are Booming
For a religious theme, in emulation of ancient weddings is the recreation of an ancient Hebrew wedding in Biblical style or weddings in the style performed by first century Christians. An ancient wedding is a costume drama. Wedding guests participate. On the invitation, you tell guests to appear in costume of the era, such as ancient Biblical, Roman, Greek, or Egyptian. You state the ambiance, era, and costume preferred on the invitation.
Easiest and least expensive to re-create is Cleopatra’s era in Egypt or a Biblical-costumed wedding catering foods mentioned in the Bible.These foods are low cost to prepare, such as legumes, grain, fruit, juices, wine, loaves and fishes.
Or serve whole grain breads, cheeses, raw vegetables, grapes, wheat and parsley salads, and desserts made of sesame seeds, nuts, honey or honey cakes, and dried fruit. The Biblical wedding fits in well with weddings serving catered or home-made raw foods salads and desserts.
How to Plan the Neighborhood Budget
After you’ve given your wedding couple a budget ranging from $200 for a small backyard, home-catered wedding to $10,000- $30,00 for a stage-based wedding ceremony in a museum, art gallery, theater or university auditorium, social hall, hotel ballroom, church basement, synagogue, social center, rented school gymnasium, large loft, or mansion, what you’ll need next is a clergy person or designated official for the bride and groom to read when vows are exchanged.
The person needs to be licensed to perform weddings and to record the license the next day at the county recorder’s office. Otherwise, you’ll be given a signed certificate as well as a clergy person’s certificate that’s signed to take to the country recorder’s office to register your marriage so it will be legally recognized.
You’ll need to do this so your spouse can prove to social security when both of you retire that you really are legally married. If you’re doing an ancient wedding in the pagan or humanist style, be sure the person performing your wedding ceremony is legally recognized as having the right to perform marriage rites and have them registered at the county recorder’s office. You’ll also need a marriage license of one type or another.
Marriages must be recorded to be legal. After you arrange someone to legally marry you and participate in a reenactment of your ancient costume drama, you’ll need a script for the bride, groom, and clergy person to read and follow to carry out the rites of a particular period in time or a specific type of ethnic wedding, either religious, civil, historical, or new thought. Prepare several scripts to show clients.
A good mix is to have one or two scripts each for ancient costume drama weddings based on ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt, Israel, India, China, Japan, or customize to meet the needs of each ethnic group you want to target, such as ancient Java, Philippines, Vietnam, Native American, Polynesian, Romany, or any other ethnic group. You can have weddings focused on customs, historical periods, and lifestyles associated with biking, Viking, Russian, Arabic, Mesopotamian, Sumerian, or the land of your own origin. Take your pick.
Research your own background’s ancient wedding customs and combine the script with genealogy services of subcontractors, costume designers, musicians, and caterers. Network with costume companies and their suppliers. Look for ancient costumes and/or patterns at the Costumer’s Manifesto site. See Hunkin’s Experiments with ancient costume designs and patterns that are easy to make. Ethnic and bellydance studios also have excellent contacts for recreating costumes.
Contact the designer of ancient Egyptian costumes for weddings as well as other ancient costumes for costume dramas, historical ethnic dancers, and ethnic performers find the costume designers design books that we have complete costumes from head to toe in them, look for a book that offers clear step-by-step instructions for bras and hip belts, music CDs, skirts, head gear such as wreaths, and full-size patterns for the accessories. If you’re designing costumes for the bridal party, include a budget in your plan for a costumer or seamstress.
You find these historical items fit for weddings, pageants, and historical recreations at ethnic bazaars is belly dance events of performers costume designers and vendors accessory vendors including wedding costume designers and their music Several vendors come each year to offer photo albums of ancient wedding costume designs from the Mediterranean and other lands many of these designers take orders nationally for their custom designs.
If you want authentic wedding costumes, Middle Eastern patterns, men’s and women’s plus import accessories, custom bras for a Renaissance look right to a curious fashion Seattle Washington as for catalog asked to purchase the catalog. Props you’ll need for ancient weddings could include vendor tables selling ethnic jewelry, could you dictate music CDs, replicas of ancient sharers, dolls, and art work on brass plates.
Surprisingly some couples insist on selling booth space at their wedding for vendor tables selling related ancient replica items, clothing, and jewelry or even a no host food buffet. Suppliers advertise in magazines such as Middle Eastern connection Inc., this magazine covers Middle Eastern performance weddings, music, dance and ethnic culture and provides the most current news and entertainment information available.
For ancient Roman costumes, check out the Anytime Costumes site. For ancient Egyptian costumes, see the Zoogster Costumes site. The offer a wide variety of Egyptian costumes in various sizes and styles, such as Pharaoh, Cleopatra, Desert Sheik, Queen of the Nile, and other selections. Or check out the site of the Educational Foundation for the Fashion Industries.
To help you draw up a plan and budget for an ancient, ethnic, or Biblical-themed wedding, network with merchant and costume designers. If you want to know more about what recorded music to have at your wedding, check out the Reviews of Recordings and Books site that specializes in Middle Eastern music. When you plan and cater an ethnic or ancient-themed wedding, Biblical, humanistic, pagan, new thought, civil, historical, or theatrical, you want to start with a database listing merchants, or musical events.
You can plan costume drama ethnic, ancient-themed or modern-day ethnic food events, such as Sacramento’s (modern) Greek for a Day Food Festival at the convention center downtown that is held each year during the Labor Day weekend, vendors at ethnic bazaars, museums, historical associations, and musicians as well as students of music.
You’ll have to coordinate ethnic or historically recreated food selections with costume shop offerings or costume creations from patterns you can purchase online. You might also contact cultural clubs and suppliers as well as stores selling theatrical props. Some weddings use bellydancers (both male and female) to entertain guests before the ceremony starts.
Most people enjoy ethnic food festivals. Using ancient, Biblical, or medieval themes adds a touch of costume drama and early music to the vegan food selections. Liven-up a celebration of life party or a grand opening, especially an art gallery or museum exhibit with an ancient-themed food festival and the clean scent of vegan dips and salads.
Photo credits: Photos 1 and 3, San Diego Costume Shop (1995). Photo 2, Flickr.com Photo 4, Zoogster Costumes. Photo 5, Anne Hart Photography.
