Favor Ideas for a Geeky Wedding? 173
Rachel Grey asks: "I'm getting married in September to a fellow geek (in the MIT chapel, no less), and we're trying to find geeky wedding favors to give at the reception. Ideally these would cost $4 or less and would provide some instant fun for the guests, so that it doesn't matter if they actually take them home. Some good ideas we've had so far are tangrams (available in bulk for a little under $1/set) and micro Hoberman spheres ($4 apiece). Any more ideas?"
How about mini Rubik's cubes... (Score:3, Interesting)
Piles of lego type building blocks (Score:5, Interesting)
Silly Putty (Score:3, Interesting)
How about different colors of silly putty? You can buy bulk quantities of putty from Crazy Aaron's Puttyworld, http://www.puttyworld.com/index.html [puttyworld.com]. You could then give everyone a portion, and they could play with color mixing and other fun uses for putty.
the wedding pics (Score:5, Interesting)
Rock! (Score:2, Interesting)
Bookmarks. (Score:4, Interesting)
Another idea is to use a love letter or something you sent him/her on the book mark. In retrospect I could have used the first email I asked my wife out on a date with. It went something like this:
int ask_for_date(char *me, char *you) {
if (boyfriend(you) == true)
return APOLOGY;
if (!free_friday(you)) {
rain_check(me, you);
} else {
return wanna_head_out(me, you);
}
}
But if you have anything similar to that, like a love letter or something that you both share and put it onto/into a bookmark I think its pretty cool.
(btw, that all compiled down into the wrong byte code when it ran, she did have a boyfriend, but I still got a rain check.
Actually, Slinkies are looking good (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, sometime yesterday we also got the idea of slinkies. They provide a nice range of nerdiness depending on the user... to some they're just something fun to flip from hand to hand, but you can get as deep into the physics of the things as you want. And if people get sozzled enough they can run slinky races down the stairs at the hotel.
Re:Bookmarks. (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't buy anything: Make a donation (Score:1, Interesting)
Do what my wife and I did: don't buy silly trinkets. Instead, we placed cards on each table stating that we'd spent the equivalent amount of money ($1000) on donations to two charities (The Canadian Cancer Society [cancer.ca] and the Huntington Society of Canada [hsc-ca.org]).
You could do the geeky thing and make a donation to the EFF [eff.org] or something.
chocolate (Score:2, Interesting)
We handed these out 1.5 hours into the reception, and geek and non-geek friends made lots of puns about them, and had fun with the idea.
We made enough extra to bring to workplaces for people whom we hadn't invited to the wedding.
Re:the wedding pics (Score:2, Interesting)
We thought about this for our wedding, but ultimately decided it was too much hassle. Besides, the Mac was busy playing our hand-picked playlist of ceremony and reception music. ;-) Our favors were just nice little bags of blue and white M&Ms (our wedding colors) that everyone enjoyed. Some of the other suggestions here might have been pretty cool, but that's ok.
Instead, we made up CDs and sent them out with the thankyou notes. That gave us time to put some polish on the CD, making them friendly to our non-geek guests too. Because music is my hobby, I wrote and recorded 5 songs that were used in the ceremony. So we actually made enhanced audio CDs, containing those 5 songs plus a data track with all of the pictures, MP3s of the reception playlist, and a 5-minute video sample from the DVD (still working on completing that). For navigation, we used a mini version of our website [mikeandbev.org] pointing to all the files on the CD. The CD was then setup to auto-start the web browser in either Mac or Windows, and we even included QuickTime installers for anyone who might not have it.
We've gotten a lot of compliments, especially from the non-geek guests, so I'm glad we didn't rush something less polished to hand out at the reception.
Not Really a Party Favor But..... (Score:1, Interesting)
Judging by all the laughter and other comments everyone had a good time and at the end of the evening a substantial number of tableclothes were missing.
Best of luck getting spliced.
Ed Almos